Over the past three years nearly 1,300 cases of paramilitaries forcing people from their homes have been reported by Northern Ireland’s Housing Executive, responsible for managing its public housing scheme. This number, about 70 per cent of the total, dwarfed incidents linked to antisocial behaviour, sectarianism, racism and sexual orientation. The high number of intimidations occurred mostly in unionist or loyalist areas, as was revealed in a valuable piece of investigative journalism this week. They clearly indicate that paramilitary organisations continue to dominate such communities despite the stabilisation and reconciliation mechanisms built into the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
Protestant loyalist paramilitaries were slower to decommission arms after the agreement than the Provisional IRA and dissident nationalist ones, but they had done so by the time of elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2011. This did not however diminish their powerful community role. The real and perceived poverty of their communities relative to nationalist working class ones in fact reinforced their leadership positions in marching bands and other organisations.
Having originally been empowered by collusion with army and police intelligence and paramilitary campaigns against the IRA they found a new rationale in organising protests around the flags and emblems issues over the past four years.
This tangled background helps explain why such intimidation is a public issue that must be tackled politically and cannot be resolved by other means. The prolonged all-party talks chaired in 2013 by Richard Haass on the flags and emblems question failed to resolve those differences. These questions are still outstanding and are due to be discussed again in coming weeks.
Agreement on them would help de-escalate inter-community tensions by providing a common approach to issues of memory and justice arising from Northern Ireland’s conflict. Their importance and relevance for Ireland North and South is illustrated by the continuing search for people abducted and murdered in 1972 by the IRA in Co Meath. That they remain unresolved is an indictment of those who govern with the Belfast Agreement. While no one should underestimate the agreement’s success in eliminating conflict and bringing peace its promise and potential to reconcile differences and overcome them dynamically remains unfulfilled.
Political pressures on Northern Ireland’s budgets arising from the Conservative government’s welfare cuts, from the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU and from next year’s assembly elections will combine to force the executive to confront these issues. The North’s political parties must also try once again to agree on how best to deal with the questions of flags, emblems and memory that bolster paramilitary power.