A founder member of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) he was the early public face of the movement as the organisation's spokesman, and he later became involved in the group's attempts to politicise.
[2] According to Smyth the area was regularly attacked by republicans from Ardoyne throwing nail bombs and shooting, and that in response he organised local men into a vigilante group.
His first engagement came in 1972 when he appeared, wearing a mask, on a television debate with John Hume, warning him of a "Protestant backlash" against the recent formation of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
He reacted to an interview with Dáithí Ó Conaill published in the press by stating "at that moment in time I could have, without a twinge of conscience, bombed every well-filled chapel in Belfast".
[7] The journal also repeated claims, which had initially appeared earlier in the Protestant Telegraph, that the Easter Rising had been personally blessed by Pope Benedict XV as well as allegations of Smyth's own devising that the green, white and orange colours of the Flag of Ireland had been chosen to represent the Papacy rather than Thomas Davis's desire that Protestant and Catholic should unite in peace and that James Connolly, the socialist activist whose Irish Citizen Army had taken part in the 1916 Rising, had been ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church.
[7] His position of leadership had effectively ended by 1973, by which time other early leaders such as Jim Anderson, had also been pushed aside with power lying firmly in the hands of Charles Harding Smith and Tommy Herron.
[16] In the late summer of 1975, a group of American academics and businesspeople with Irish links organised a conference in Amherst, Massachusetts to discuss the future of Northern Ireland.
Although they sent out invitations to several leading political and paramilitary figures few chose to attend, with the exception of Irish Republican Socialist Party leader Seamus Costello and the Reverend Martin Smyth, the Grand Master of the Orange Institution.
Whilst the delegation pushed the ideals of Ulster nationalism, which was found favour with the UDA at that point, during the debates Smyth's main contribution was to argue that the civil rights that had dominated nationalist rhetoric was as applicable to Protestants as it was to Catholics.