The loyalist threat to Northern Ireland
By Beatrix Campbell
Media coverage of the latest report on paramilitary activities places undue attention on republican violence
Guardian 11/06/09
Disarming republicans has always been the obsession of conservative politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea. That agenda has so infused the prevailing perceptions that to this day it dominates debates about peaceful coexistence in Northern Ireland.
The coverage of the Independent Monitoring Commission's (IMC's) 22nd report on paramilitary activities, vindicates that tradition. Shootings by dissident republican sects at war with both the British and Sinn Féin defined the news. A month ago when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton visited Northern Ireland it was the same story: new threat from republicans. So, is peace in Northern Ireland still threatened by the republicans?
No, says the IMC.
In fact, the Provisional IRA has disarmed and disbanded. The Irish National Liberation Army has declared that "armed struggle is over" and promised to decommission. According to the IMC, Sinn Féin and the IRA army council have adhered to their commitment to peaceful politics. The loyalist paramilitary organisations, the UDA, LVF and UVF – despite some acts of decommissioning – have not.
Decommissioning of republicans dominated political discourse throughout the 1990s, before, during and after the historic ceasefires in 1994. It dogged the peace process that delivered the Good Friday agreement in 1998. And it was the spectre haunting the intermittent progress towards devolved self-government.
The sovereign government finally established at Stormont was wrecked not by republicans but Peter Mandelson's undiplomatic and undignified endorsement of a unionist agenda and by MI5's messing about with spooks at Stormont. Neither Mandelson nor MI5 and the security services have ever been called to account for the shady shenanigans that destabilised Northern Ireland's elected government.
The 22nd report of the IMC confirms that the most responsibility for violence in Northern Ireland lies with loyalists. And yet this week's story is the usual republican threat. The devil is in the detail, however. The report shows that casualties of violence by loyalists – shootings and assaults – number 38 in the past year, a 245% increase on the previous year. Casualities of republican shootings and assaults number 25, up by 56%.
These figures indicate some very worrying trends: loyalist gangsterism is rife, dangerous and productive, and dissident sects have murdered members of the security forces at a time when diplomats and politicians in Washington, London, Dublin and not least Belfast are desperate to get unionists and republican parties to sign up to "normal" policing.
The IMC notes that it is "inexperienced young men" who are enlisting with the dissident republicans. But it is mute about the sinister synergy between these young men's pessimistic attraction to violence and unionist resistance to "normalisation" of policing and the apparent lack of sanctions against loyalist warlords and their sponsorship of gangsterism. When the IMC reports again in six months' time, it is to be hoped that it finally turns its mind to that scary matrix.
