In the North, everybody knows about Jamie Bryson. People in the South may know of Bryson, prominent loyalist activist, but perhaps don’t know much about him. He is young, unelected and not part of any political party – but he is a player in Northern Ireland, has been since he was 19, and will be into the future, however it unfolds.
He is anti-Belfast Agreement, pro-Brexit, opposed to the Windsor Framework and dyspeptic about nationalism, a feeling that is hugely reciprocated by nationalists, and for the long-haul he is determined to prevent the “doomsday scenario” of a united Ireland.
Many argue that such is Bryson’s wind-up provocation of nationalists, he is hastening the end of the union. He doesn’t buy these arguments.
“I think for 25 years there’s been a combat in which unionism hasn’t bothered to get on the battlefield and has sat back constantly trying to placate and appease nationalists. I think it’s about time that unionism took the gloves off.”
One of the reasons the Northern Executive and Assembly has been in cold storage for close to two years is because Jeffrey Donaldson and others in the DUP are wary of Bryson and the influence he wields with grassroots loyalism. On Friday the party was meeting to decide whether to break from the chains of that pressure and finally restore powersharing.
Bryson is in the Brendan Behan camp on the subject of publicity. If he isn’t the centre of attention, he will fire up the anger machine that is X (formerly Twitter). Just before Christmas, he posted, “Hopefully Santa gets permission from the EU to enter Northern Ireland.” When Celtic defeated Rangers 2-1 in the post-Christmas Old Firm derby he posted that this was because the officials at the game “vote Sinn Féin”.
That was at the benign end of the social media battlefront. The responses he gets swing between anger, annoyance and ridicule, with considerable attention paid to his slight lisp.
“A lot of people seem to spend most of their lives abusing me on Twitter. So I mean, sometimes it’s nice to give them a pat on the head and give them something to be annoyed about.”
A number of times during the interview Bryson stresses the last thing he wants is a return to violence, not least because “I imagine I would be a target if things like that were to transpire again”.
That is not just an idle or vainglorious concern. At the darker end of the internet, Bryson has received numerous death threats, and a number of people have been convicted for such actions – the most recent at Christmas when a man, himself a loyalist, received a 10-month prison sentence for threatening to kill him.
Detractors think some sort of Svengali or “invisible hand” is directing him, but Bryson is his own man, bright and quick-witted and capable of arguing whatever is put up to him. At times he talks like a constitutional lawyer. He has earned a crust as a paralegal, and currently is finishing a law degree that he hopes will soon have him at the bar.
Bryson says unionists have lost out on flags, parades, bonfires and cultural identity generally, and that this is all part of a campaign of nationalist “appeasement” – “unionists must give and nationalists must get”. Now, with the Windsor Framework, the Act of Union is constitutionally undermined because, he says, Northern Ireland is “subject to EU law and the European Court of Justice”.
Last year, as part of the “culture war”, he lodged a complaint that Bloody Sunday families had broken parades legislation by walking together to the court in Derry for a hearing about Soldier F, who is charged in relation to a number of the 1972 killings. It seemed petty, but his take was that if Orangemen and loyalists must have their parades restricted, then so too must nationalists, although whether a group of Bloody Sunday families walking to a court constitutes a parade is a moot point.
There is a card on his mantelpiece in Bangor with a quote from Napoleon: “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes stop thinking and go in.” It’s a maxim Bryson has diligently followed.
Born in 1990, he was a child of the peace and the Belfast Agreement. Raised in Donaghadee, Co Down, on the Ards peninsula, he had a happy childhood. His Church of Ireland and unionist parents weren’t politically active. He has relations in the Tyrone area who were in the B-Specials, the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment, and some, he adds, who served prison time for Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) offences.
Bryson says he believes in God but doesn’t subscribe to any particular Protestant denomination, and seldom goes to church. An only child, as a teenager he was precocious, reading books on theology, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Belfast Agreement and constitutional law, although he also had time for football and some “laddish” interests.
[ Loyalists must get educated and get professional jobs, argues loyalist activistOpens in new window ]
When he was 16 and 17 he wrote a trilogy called Fifty Shades of God, a rather blasphemous take on the raunchy Fifty Shades of Grey, arguing for a more liberal and lighter approach by Protestant churches in order to attract more young people to the faith.
Now a social conservative, he “disavows” that work, putting it down to “youthful exuberance”. He likes tradition.
Then, when Bryson was 19, as Napoleon advised he jumped right in. In 2009 there was a row in Bangor over the withholding of funding for an Eleventh Night bonfire, and Bryson earned some media time as spokesman for the unhappy loyalists.
If the threat of violence is good enough to prevent a land border, why ought not the same to be applied to the preventing of a sea border?
— Jamie Bryson
Three years later at Christmas 2012, he was thrust into a brighter spotlight as the face of loyalist protesters who literally ran riot over Belfast City Council’s decision to limit to about 20 days the flying of the union flag over City Hall and other civic buildings.
Northern Ireland was experiencing a decent period of calm, but this emotional issue spooked a lot of people, particularly unionists, and resulted in yet another US diplomat, Richard Haass, being called in to see could he resolve the issues of flags and parades as well as legacy matters – as in, how to deal with the horrors of the past.
These talks climaxed in the period around Christmas and new year in 2013. It seemed touch and go whether there would be a deal. But here was this baby-faced figure, chirpy and ubiquitous at the margins of the talks, happy to forecast there would be no deal. And he was right. Bryson later cited how some from both the DUP and Ulster Unionist Party were secretly briefing him on the talks. He was only 23 at the time but already able to put the frighteners on unionists contemplating some compromise politics with nationalists.
He still has clout. He and the likes of Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister and some senior loyalists and Orange Order figures have insisted that the DUP should continue to block a return to Stormont until the Windsor Framework is scrapped.
And, so far, Jeffrey Donaldson is heeding those warnings although on Friday the party was wrestling with whether now was the time to end the boycott and return to Stormont.
The argument that the framework gives Northern Ireland the best of two worlds, free access to the EU and UK markets, and that some green lane, red lane bureaucracy in the trading of goods across the Irish Sea is a small price to pay for such an advantage, cuts no ice with Bryson.
Some, such as former DUP leader and first minister Peter Robinson, have urged pragmatism in these talks and warned that if powersharing did not resume, it could mean a return to direct rule with “greater involvement” from Dublin. But Bryson holds to the old “no surrender” position.
[ Newton Emerson: Jamie Bryson is a remarkably dangerous peaceful personOpens in new window ]
He won’t accept that for most people his constitutional concerns are arcane and pretty inconsequential to real life, and that the consent principle trumps any claim that the North’s place within the UK currently is under threat.
He reserves his greatest ire for Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment Simon Coveney, saying Northern Ireland is “faced with a hostile and aggressive Irish Government”.
“I feel that as an anti-agreement unionist, I could live with a deal with some fuzzy edges with the likes of [former taoiseach] Bertie Ahern, who you could shake his hand and look him in the eye and know he is not going to do you over.”
He says unionism and loyalism previously had a “fantastic relationship” with the Irish government, and with the McAleeses (former president Mary and her husband, Martin), with Bertie Ahern, even with former taoiseach Enda Kenny, and even to a degree with Tánaiste Micheál Martin, but that Varadkar has undermined that rapprochement.
What particularly infuriates him was the “absolutely appalling” move by the Taoiseach to show a copy of an Irish Times article to fellow leaders at the EU summit in 2018 to illustrate his concern that a hard North-South border could trigger a return to violence. The report by Simon Carswell related to an IRA bomb attack at a customs post in Newry, Co Down in 1972 that left nine people dead.
This was suggesting a land border could prompt republican violence and, Bryson contends, the corollary of that proposition was that an Irish Sea border could precipitate a return to loyalist paramilitary violence. “If the threat of violence is good enough to prevent a land border, why ought not the same to be applied to the preventing of a sea border? And that is a very dangerous precedent.”
He is familiar with UVF thinking and has a number of senior loyalist friends, some of whom a lot of people would consider rather shady, but insists he is not a member of the paramilitary group. Years ago he said that the IRA were terrorists but the UVF were not – and that is still his position. That view, he reckons, should not be so surprising, as similarly Sinn Féin would see loyalist paramilitaries as “terrorists and state-sponsored murder gangs and the IRA as freedom fighters”.
“I accept the incoherence of that position. I accept the moral difficulty with that position, but nevertheless it is a position which I hold, albeit alert to the inconsistencies,” he adds.
His own rather fuzzy-edged solution to the framework impasse seems surprisingly simple. He favours an “opt-in or opt-out” system where those who for “business or ideological reasons” want free trade with the two markets can do so, while those who want to be “solely subject to UK law” can eschew the EU link. He says normal criminal and customs checks could prevent smuggling or UK goods illegally entering the EU through the Republic. He appears unperturbed by the suggestion that hard-nosed business people, no matter how unionist they were in their disposition, would hardly turn up their noses at free trade into two large markets.
Another topical issue in Northern Ireland is the popular morning Stephen Nolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster. A brash tabloid-style broadcaster, Nolan also has a regular TV programme where, in often combative fashion, the issues of the day are thrashed out.
Unionism and loyalism have become so demonised in a sense that we ought not even to have a voice
— Jamie Bryson
Nationalists and some unionists claim the likes of Bryson and Jim Allister have the run of the shows, pushing an anti-agreement agenda. Bryson responds that “if anybody goes and does the stats, I am on Nolan significantly less than nationalist or republican contributors who are on consistently without any complaint from anybody”.
He contends that the attacks on Nolan come from a “liberal elite”, mainly of “supremacist” nationalists, some unionists, academia and some in the media who “want to shut down working-class, particularly loyalist or anti-agreement unionist views because it is an impediment to their political objective”.
“Unionism and loyalism have become so demonised in a sense that we ought not even to have a voice,” he says, while adding, “Wait till you see the abuse you get for doing this article.”
In the event of a Border poll resulting in a majority vote for a united Ireland, he would not accept the result. Similar to his comments about the UVF, he acknowledges the “intellectual limitations and incoherence” of that view, but is sticking to it.
What would he do in such a situation? He thinks a poll is “decades away” and even when it happens there is no certainty it would be carried. “Who knows what the context of the time would be? ... but no, I would never accept a united Ireland.”
Would he fight? “Everybody is shaped by the context which prevails at the time, so you can’t answer hypothetical questions like that.”
[ Loyalist accused of plotting to subvert a Stormont inquiry to call nine witnessesOpens in new window ]
Wrapping up a long interview, we return to the arguments that he is doing more harm than good to unionism, that he fails to take into account that nationalists had to withstand a fair degree of unionist supremacy themselves, that he is playing to a Sinn Féin agenda by antagonising even moderate nationalists who might be prevailed upon to stick by the union, and that a bit of respect for the other side might serve the interests of the union better and help bring some cross-community harmony to society – and might serve to reinstate Stormont.
But there is no give. “Are nationalists respectful to me? No they are not,” he asserts, citing former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’s 2014 speech where he spoke about equality being the issue to “break these bastards” – which was widely taken as a reference to unionists, although Adams said he was speaking generally about bigots and racists.
“For nationalism, equality is and only ever was a stepping stone to supremacy,” says Bryson. “I am contemptuous of nationalism as an idea, as an ideology. I reject it and I fight against it. But you’ve got to separate the person from the idea. So I’m contemptuous and venomously object to and fight against the whole idea and concept of nationalism. But that doesn’t mean that I am hostile to the people or the person.”
Is that therefore the way politics is to be conducted into the future? “Well it ought to be,” he says.
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