Tara (Northern Ireland)

Tara was an Ulster loyalist movement in Northern Ireland that espoused a brand of evangelical Protestantism. Preaching a hard-line and somewhat esoteric brand of loyalism, Tara enjoyed some influence in the late 1960s before declining amid a high-profile sex abuse scandal involving its leader William McGrath.

The roots of Tara lay in a group known as "The Cell". This shadowy group, headed by the evangelist William McGrath, was made up of a mixture of his youthful followers and senior Orangemen who met at 15 Wellington Park, McGrath's Malone Road, Belfast base for his mission. Young men such as Fraser Agnew, Roy Garland and Clifford Smyth, became part of this growing but mainly clandestine group. The cell spearheaded a campaign of speeches to Protestant audiences, more political than religious in tone, encouraging unionists to turn away from the relatively moderate Terence O'Neill and to lend their support to his most vocal political opponent, the hardline Ian Paisley.

In November 1966 McGrath reconstituted the Cell as Tara, choosing the name to reflect his belief in the Irish heritage of his politico-religious mission. It was intended as an outlet for virulent anti-Catholicism. The group endorsed British Israelism as it sometimes claimed that Ulster Protestants were descendants of the Lost tribe of Israel. The group espoused a form of historical revisionism, arguing that the early inhabitants of Ireland had come from modern Scotland before being displaced by the Irish, whilst also utilising Gaelic terms and symbols. An Orange Order lodge attached to Tara and founded by McGrath was named "Ireland's Heritage" as a consequence of these views. Tara adopted as its motto "we hold Ulster that Ireland might be saved and Britain reborn". As a movement Tara sought to establish a Protestant Northern Ireland in which law and order would be paramount and the Roman Catholic Church would be outlawed. Tara viewed Catholics as being in a grand conspiracy with moderate unionists and left-wing groups and felt that a conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism was inevitable. As a result members of Tara were expected to be proficient in weapon use and were encouraged to join the security forces.

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