Roy Garland is a newspaper columnist for the

nationalist Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...

Irish News Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

'' and a member of the

Ulster Unionist Party The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) is a unionist political party in Northern Ireland. The party was founded in 1905, emerging from the Irish Unionist Alliance in Ulster. Under Edward Carson, it led unionist opposition to the Irish Home Rule ...

Career

In the 1960s, Garland became convinced that the

Northern Ireland civil rights movement The Northern Ireland civil rights movement dates to the early 1960s, when a number of initiatives emerged in Northern Ireland which challenged the inequality and discrimination against ethnic Irish Catholics that was perpetrated by the Ulster Pr ...

was a front for the IRA and

Roman Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

and that its activities would lead to the persecution of

Protestant Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...

s. As a result he got deeply involved in paramilitarism,

Orangeism The Loyal Orange Institution, commonly known as the Orange Order, is an international Protestant fraternal order based in Northern Ireland and primarily associated with Ulster Protestants, particularly those of Ulster Scots heritage. It also ...

and Unionism.BBC NI - Eyewitness
/ref> At that time one of the organisations Garland supported was Tara, a movement, led by

William McGrath William McGrath (11 December 1916 – 1992) was a Ulster loyalism, loyalist from Northern Ireland who founded the far-right organisation Tara (Northern Ireland), Tara in the 1960s, having also been prominent in the Orange Order until his expuls ...

, which espoused extreme

anti-Catholic Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards Catholics or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy, and/or its adherents. At various points after the Reformation, some majority Protestant states, including England, Prussia, Scotland, and ...

views. In the late 60s, he worked closely with the UVF in an attempt the strengthen links between the two groups. Garland later became a prominent opponent of McGrath and helped expose his involvement in the Kincora Boys' Home scandal. Some years later, Garland had grave doubts about the direction in which the Orange Order and the

(UUP) were going and he left both organisations. According to Garland, "...there was a lot of twisting of the rules, and also I heard stories about people within our organisation attacking Catholics and I felt that this wasn't right, this was not the war, you know, to protect ourselves - this was actually an aggressive war." Garland subsequently returned to the UUP, aiming to support a non-sectarian unionism. However he is a vocal opponent of closer links between the UUP and the Conservative Party, and was in October 2009 described as one of "four older men who no longer play an active role in the party." He inherited his family's cleaning-products business, and is now a journalist and writer for the ''

''. He is also the author of several books including ''

Gusty Spence Augustus Andrew Spence (28 June 1933
. ''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Garland, Roy Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Journalists from Northern Ireland Ulster Unionist Party politicians Male non-fiction writers from Northern Ireland