Martin Smyth

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Reverend William Martin Smyth is a Northern Ireland unionist politician, and was Ulster Unionist Party Member of Parliament for Belfast South from 1982-2005. He was a Vice-President of the Conservative Monday Club. He is also an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and was minister of Raffrey, County Down from 1957 to 1963 and of Alexandra Church, Belfast 1963-1982. Smyth was brought up in the Donegall Road area of Belfast, and attended Methodist College Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. Smyth became Grand Master of the Orange Order in 1971, in what was seen at the time as a working-class "grass roots" revolt against the till then middle-class leadership of the Order. In the 1970s, he was a Deputy Leader of the Vanguard movement which had emerged as a faction within the Ulster Unionist Party. However, when this faction split from the UUP to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, Smyth chose to remain with the UUP