The entire Irish nationalist political establishment, North and South, has been meeting, facilitating and funding paramilitary-linked loyalist groups for over a quarter of a century. This is the bleakly comic backdrop to complaints about links between loyalists and anti-immigrant figures in the Republic. However, it has taken the hoax bomb attack on Simon Coveney in Belfast two years ago to finally bring the absurdity home.
Last Thursday, the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement demanded to know why four loyalist community organisations are being supported by the International Fund for Ireland, which is run by the British and Irish governments. A former director of one of the organisations is facing charges connected to the Coveney attack.
In Northern Ireland, similar funding arrangements exist on a larger scale, as part of Stormont and Westminster all-party policies to “transition” loyalists away from paramilitarism. At Stormont and in councils, Sinn Féin and the DUP divvy up further pots of cash between their favoured community groups. As in the Republic, the same questions are increasingly asked: why do loyalist paramilitaries still exist and why are we paying them to go away, without success?
The fundamental answer is that everyone is still wrestling with an initial design flaw in the peace process – an assumption of symmetry that did not work out as planned. Throughout the negotiations of the 1990s, the British government and many others encouraged loyalism to develop a political project mirroring that of Sinn Féin. This briefly appeared realistic. Loyalist parties joined the talks and their combined vote rose to 6 per cent. The DUP panicked as its vote fell and several councillors jumped ship. In a notorious 1996 incident, the DUP sought to associate itself with the anti-agreement Loyalist Volunteer Force. Although nobody expected pro-agreement loyalism to become a major electoral bloc, it did not need to be to provide a counterpart to republicanism. Sinn Féin was the smaller party of nationalism; the SDLP and UUP were envisaged leading Stormont from the centre.
The balance of this neat design was destroyed as Sinn Féin grew, the DUP recovered and loyalist politics shrank – by 2003 it was down to one party, one Assembly member and 1 per cent of the vote. In the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, Stormont was recast as a DUP and Sinn Féin partnership. Republicans were brought in from the cold and loyalists were trapped behind the mirror. Without political representation, how could their existence be reflected?
This might have been the point to put them out of business but a long tail of republican activity made that problematic. By the time the IRA was more or less gone – its last murder was in 2015 – peace-processing had compromised every ethical argument against tolerating paramilitarism. Loyalists demanded equal indulgence to that shown to republicans, and did not see why it should cease because unionists had stopped voting for them. Ironically, they are more inclined to say nationalists compromised themselves by voting for Sinn Féin.
The systemic need for a loyalist “party” was demonstrated in 2015 by the establishment of the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC), an unelected body that includes representatives of three paramilitary groups. It was launched with the support of unionist figures and Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff during the Belfast Agreement negotiations. The LCC is considered another failure. Two weeks ago, Northern Secretary Hilary Benn and PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Bobby Singleton let it be known they have no intention of ever meeting it. This is not because the PSNI or the British government object to the concept of such a group; it is because “they realise that it’s powerless and nothing more than a talking shop for old men,” as a Northern Ireland Office official told the Sunday Life. A “successful” LCC would still be feted.
Wider yearning for the lost loyalist political project can be seen in the deification of the late David Ervine, leader of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party. Having helped deliver the 1994 loyalist ceasefire, Ervine was unable to transition the UVF much further away from crime and violence. However, he had a gift for telling the great and the good what they wanted to hear.
Unionists tell themselves loyalist politics failed because unionists would not vote for terrorists. Although this view might be somewhat self-serving, it could have been seized on at any time – including the present – to provide political cover for a law-and-order crackdown on loyalism. Instead, it has always been treated with disdain by the authorities, partly because they wanted unionists to vote for terrorists.
If the Oireachtas wants to get to the bottom of why Dublin, London and Stormont are still writing cheques to loyalists, it should rewind back to that flawed hope at the start of the peace process and start from there.