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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Margaret Urwin, "A State in Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries" (Mercier Press, 2016)
Description: A State in Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries (Mercier Press, 2016) uses previously secret official documents to explore the tangled web of relationships between the top echelons of the British establishment, incl Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, police/military officers and intelligence services with loyalist paramilitaries of the UDA & UVF throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Covert British Army units, mass sectarian screening, propaganda 'dirty tricks, ' arming sectarian killers and a point-blank refusal over the worst two decades of the conflict, to outlaw the largest loyalist killer gang in Northern Ireland. It shows how tactics such as curfew an...