If we tolerate the paramilitaries, are we surrendering our children’s futures?
Posted by Jim on December 12, 2021
A report last week said paramilitaries should be asked to ‘voluntarily wind up’ their profitable business. Can we afford such noble intentions?
A sign on a lamppost in the Rathcoole housing estate of Newtownabbey, County Antrim, Northern Ireland with a mural to the Red Hand Commando (RHC) a secretive Ulster loyalist paramilitary group (Liam McBurney/PA)
December 12 2021 09:03 AM
Eight months ago, I stood for hours in rain and smoke just off Belfast’s Shankill Road. As darkness fell and an orchestrated riot developed, a young adult trained children in the manufacture of petrol bombs.
The child ‘soldiers’ were instructed by loyalist men — some of whom wore balaclavas and surgical gloves — to attack the riot police who stood between them and a nationalist area. When the police surged forward, the inexperienced young rioters at the front were most vulnerable to arrest.
The profoundly depressing scene encapsulated the failure of the peace process to eradicate paramilitarism.
It was an unusually public demonstration of how children born not only after the Good Friday Agreement, but in some cases after Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness’s rapprochement in 2007, are being pulled into gangsterism.
Ritual condemnation of that disorder flowed in, as it always does. But some of those doing the condemning — including the police and some politicians — have facilitated the embedding of paramilitarism in post-Troubles Northern Ireland.
For years, some senior police officers have maintained relationships with senior loyalist paramilitaries, while pretending that they are engaging with them as community leaders, or in some other guise disbelieved by the canny people of the areas from which they come.
But while that police engagement may be expedient in the short-term, providing a means of lowering tension at key points, it entrenches the power of the untouchable paramilitary bosses.
Local residents, who are urged in police and government advertising to report paramilitary activity, can see the Government is fully aware who controls the paramilitaries.
Once Mr Big has proved useful in ending a riot or assisting the Government in some other way, it must be very tempting — perhaps even morally justified — to think that it is better to deal with him, than with the younger militants who might take over if he were to be jailed. But such an approach perpetuates paramilitarism.
Boris Johnson’s Brexit minister, Lord Frost, met the loyalist paramilitaries’ umbrella group just a month after April’s rioting. That drew criticism — but in truth it was just a more public glimpse of a longstanding policy to allegedly illegal organisations.
British and Irish officials regularly interact with people they know to be paramilitaries — and do so because they are paramilitaries — as do many of Stormont’s parties.
Since April, the sort of unavoidable evidence of abnormality seen in a riot has faded away. In its place is what people in some of Northern Ireland’s most forlorn areas have suffered for years — paramilitary shootings, vicious beatings with crowbars or hammers, extortion, sexual assaults, drug-dealing, threats, loansharking, and the knowledge that certain individuals are untouchable.
The fact this is restricted to deprived areas at least partially explains why it has been tolerated for so long. Such behaviour on Belfast’s swanky Malone Road or Cherryvalley neighbourhood would face a radically different police response.
A UVF gunman fires a volley of shots in the air at a Twelfth bonfire. PA file picture by Paul Faith
In the four years between 2017 and 2021, a full 70pc of Northern Ireland’s electoral wards saw no paramilitary attacks. But where paramilitaries are strong, they are very strong. The UVF and UDA are believed by the security services to have about 12,500 members — more than ten times the membership of Northern Ireland’s biggest political party, the DUP.
Last week a highly significant report commissioned jointly by Stormont and the British and Irish governments involved an admission of defeat: that the security forces and the entirety of the government machine cannot defeat paramilitarism.
Instead, they suggested paramilitaries should be asked to voluntarily wind up their profitable business.
The report by the Independent Reporting Commission sets out a plan to effectively negotiate with paramilitary leaders. If history is a guide, that is likely to involve them being given influence over millions of pounds of public funding.
The “transition”, the report said, should involve “direct engagement with the paramilitary groups themselves” and involve “their co-operation”. Although written in code, the report applies to loyalists who at least claim to want to change, unlike dissident republicans.
But in justifying such a strategy, the commission alluded to its limitations, admitting that using the police alone “is not enough” to end paramilitarism.
They insisted that a police crackdown would continue. However, it is difficult to see how the police can arrest paramilitary leaders on a Monday and the government negotiate with them on a Tuesday.
Stormont’s parties have been kept informed of this proposal, and the paucity of objections suggests that it is being seriously considered.
Most of those backing the idea have the noblest of intentions, but even some of the commissioners behind the report acknowledged that there are major risks in their suggestions.
John McBurney, the commissioner closest to the DUP, evoked biblical imagery, telling the Sunday Independent that it would be like “Gideon’s fleece”, with a series of measures which the groups would have to pass to get to the next stage.
Just as Gideon had put out a fleece and asked God prove himself by making it wet and the ground around it dry, so it would be possible to test the sincerity of these groups, he said. But Gideon’s interlocutor was more reliable than the sort of people who deal drugs and shoot teenagers.
What does it really mean for a paramilitary organisation to disband?
The Provisional IRA claimed that it had done so around 2007. Yet six years ago the IRA was believed by police to have been involved in a murder in Belfast. The current security assessment says that the IRA still exists, that it retains access to weapons, and that it gathers intelligence. But because that is overwhelmingly geared towards politics, it is accepted.
Despite the rhetoric, some in government do not want the current paramilitary groups to disband, believing that more militant replacements could replace them.
Former Dublin justice minister Michael McDowell has said that it was never the intention of the British or Irish governments that the IRA disband, believing that “an inert, freeze-dried husk of the IRA was preferable to passing the ideological torch to the dissidents.”
Last year, MI5 told MPs that it did not believe that total suppression of terrorism in Northern Ireland was a realistic aim, saying “that looks to us to be an undeliverable goal”.
Having seen what happened to the IRA, loyalists are likely to conclude that they don’t actually need to disband — or even end all criminality — but instead make their activities less explicitly criminal, more secretive, and less violent.
If the Government openly admits that it knows who the paramilitaries are but is choosing not to arrest them, accepts that it cannot defeat them, and instead asks them nicely to go away, it will have inescapable consequences. Whether the policy succeeds or fails in the long run, its immediate impact will be to consolidate paramilitary power.
If the Government admits it cannot put them out of business, it would be a brave resident who would report a crime committed by a local paramilitary commander — who is sitting down with government officials.
In such a case, the children of Northern Ireland would see that it is the paramilitaries who really hold the power.
And thus the cycle is perpetuated.