Early Life
William Stephen "Billy" Wright, named after his grandfather, was born in Wolverhampton, England on 7 July 1960 to David Wright and Sarah McKinley, Protestants from Northern Ireland. He was the only son of five children. Before Wright's birth, his parents had moved to England when they fell out with their fellow Protestants in the community after his grandfather had challenged tradition by running as an Independent Unionist candidate and defeated the local Official Unionist MP. The Wright family had a long tradition in Northern Ireland politics; Billy's great-grandfather had once served as a Royal Commissioner. His father obtained employment in the West Midlands industrial city of Wolverhampton.
At the age of four, Wright's parents separated and his mother left the family. While his father remained in England, Wright and his four sisters returned to Northern Ireland, where he was raised in a children's home in Mountnorris, South Armagh (a predominantly Irish nationalist area). Wright was brought up in the Presbyterian religion and attended church twice on Sundays. The young Wright mixed with Catholics and played Gaelic football indicating an amicable relationship with the local Catholic, nationalist population. Nor were his family extreme loyalists. Wright's father, while campaigning for an inquest into his son's death, would later describe loyalist killings as "abhorrent". Two of Wright's sisters married Catholic men, one having come from County Tipperary and whom Wright liked. Wright's sister Angela maintained that he personally got on well with Catholics, and that he was only anti-Republican and anti-IRA. Indeed for a while David Wright cohabitated with Kathleen McVeigh, a Catholic from Garvagh.
At the age of 15, Wright, whilst attending Markethill High School, took a part-time job as a farm labourer where he came into contact with a number of staunchly unionist and loyalist farmers who served with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Reserve or the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The sanguineous religious/political conflict known as "The Troubles" had been raging across Northern Ireland for over five years by this stage, and many young men such as Wright would be swept up in the maelstrom of violence as the Provisional IRA ramped up its bombing campaign and sectarian killings continued to escalate. During this time Wright's opinions moved towards loyalism and soon he got into trouble for writing the initials "UVF" on a local primary school wall. When he refused to clean off the vandalism, Wright was transferred from the area and sent to live with an aunt in Portadown.
Read more about this topic: Billy Wright (loyalist)
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