Formation
The group had been mooted in late 1973 when Harry Murray, a shop steward at Harland & Wolff, and other loyalist trade unionists had met at the Hawthornden Road headquarters of the Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party (VPUP) to discuss setting up a more formal version of the LAW The formation of the group was announced in the April 1974 edition of Ulster Loyalist, a publication of the UDA, with the announcement promising that workers would be central to the political future of Northern Ireland and that these workers were preparing to mobilise against a united Ireland. From the outset most politicians were excluded from these meetings with the exception of VPUP leader William Craig and his party colleague David Trimble.
The Ulster Workers' Council (UWC) name was adopted by February 1974 with the group chaired by Glenn Barr, at the time a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the VPUP as well as a brigadier in the UDA. He was joined by the likes of Murray and Billy Kelly and Tom Beattie from Ballylumford power station. These were sometimes joined by Andy Tyrie on behalf of the UDA and Ken Gibson of the Ulster Volunteer Force, as well as representatives of smaller loyalist groups such as the Orange Volunteers and Down Orange Welfare.
Read more about this topic: Ulster Workers' Council
Famous quotes containing the word formation:
“I want you to consider this distinction as you go forward in life. Being male is not enough; being a man is a right to be earned and an honor to be cherished. I cannot tell you how to earn that right or deserve that honor. . . but I can tell you that the formation of your manhood must be a conscious act governed by the highest vision of the man you want to be.”
—Kent Nerburn (20th century)
“Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful—the formation of fixed habits of work.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)