This writer may currently stand alone in terms of Assembly representation, but he enjoys the overwhelming support of his party and of many thousands throughout Northern Ireland who respect truth and political integrity.
On the day when his former Assembly colleagues resigned to form a sixth unionist party, and further fractionalise pro-Union support, he had a lengthy consultation with the leaders of FAIT (Families Against Intimidation and Terror). Their revelations made his concerns pale into relative unimportance, for they provided a grim and horrendous future for the people of Northern Ireland in the Millennium.
Many decent and law-abiding people voted Yes in the referendum, not only on the basis of the Prime Minister's pledges, but in the belief that it would bring not only peace and social stability, but secure a future for their children and grandchildren. These were worthy and honourable aspirations and hopes.
Such people, in their desire for these objectives, were willing to swallow many things they found abhorrent. They accepted the early release of those convicted of the worst crimes against humanity; they were willing to abide the political representatives of terrorist organisations in government in the belief that these people would abandon murder and terror in exchange for a commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means.
They acknowledged that, in such changed circumstances, a reduction in security measures and a reform of the RUC might be justified. All of this they were prepared to tolerate in exchange for a peaceful and secure future for their children.
What the writer's consultation with the FAIT leaders confirmed was that this utopian future is fast turning into a macabre nightmare which the government, in pursuit of its own political agenda, is either ignoring or, worse, suppressing. While the newspapers and the media are flooding the electorate with largely unfounded prospects for the future, the whole social sub-structure of Northern Ireland is being systematically destroyed in an increasing tide of criminality, drug culture, and violence.
From a government perspective, the entire peace process depended upon persuading terrorist groups to desist from violence. To obtain this goal, it was necessary not only to meet their political demands but to refrain from antagonising them. In this, the government has been partially successful in that the current ceasefire has obtained a respite in the killing of security force personnel and the bombing, by some groups, of economic targets.
The price to be paid for peace at this level is to tolerate the activity of terrorists in the disadvantaged areas which, under the relaxed security policy, they now dominate. Parties and the terrorist groups they represent now assume social and political control over areas of Northern Ireland where the rule of law has ceased to operate.
This control is enforced with a callous brutality, the results of which are now a daily occurrence. The FAIT statistics, authenticated from official agencies, confirm that, in 1998, more incidents of beatings, shootings, intimidations and exiles occurred than at any time in the past 30 years.
The actual cost of this violence is estimated at £10 million, yet this is only the tip of the real cost. As a direct consequence of this breakdown of the rule of law and social disintegration of such areas, criminality of a non-political kind has flourished. This is particularly evident in the vast increase in drug trafficking and drug-related crime. Within the terrorist organisations there are many more criminals than political idealists and, in many cases, these groups are now little more than Mafia families whose ethos and methods they share.
The IRA, UVF and the UDA are all now main players in the trafficking and profits of drugs. The IRA operates less directly than the others. Drug dealers are licensed by it upon payment of a percentage. Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD), which has been responsible for the murder of known drug dealers, is the IRA's enforcement agency against those who, like the late Michael Mooney, do not pay or else flout the IRA's authority. The UDA, which largely controls drugs in loyalist areas such as Belfast, Ballymena, Antrim, and Bangor, is much more directly involved. According to the Sunday Times, Johnny Adair, while still in the Maze, was in receipt of £1,500 per week. The Mafia comparisons are startling, and the money involved runs into millions.
Many of the deaths and mutilations are the product of gang warfare by enforcers, whose relation to political activity is minimal. Like many cities in the United States, the disadvantaged areas are becoming uncontrollable by the forces of law and order, whose authority is put in question on largely fabricated political grounds.
But what of the future for the children and grandchildren of the Yes voters? Many such voters, for the present, live in residential areas which the RUC still polices, but what of the future in the Millennium? The growth industry will be that of security devices and secure private developments with patrol arrangements. The well-off may be able to retreat behind fences but drug-related crime will hit new levels. Middle-class children will have to emerge for schools, discos and concerts, and there the peddlers and the traffickers will be waiting.
The present policies of the government require a relaxed attitude towards terrorist crime. Mo Mowlam and Adam Ingram show absolutely no inclination to confront those responsible for these beatings and shootings, or to acknowledge that these occurrences are breaches of the ceasefire which would require the expulsion of those parties, like Sinn Fein and the PUP, who, on Mo Mowlam's own admission, are inextricably linked to the perpetrators.
The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State are not the only people who fail adequately to acknowledge these connections, for the same accusation can be laid at the door of the Great, the Good and the Well-Off. Mrs Kearney may pray by her lighted candle, knowing who brutally murdered her son, and the organisations they represented, but the requirements of a morally bankrupt government and policy will ensure that she and the thousands like her will, in real terms, be ignored.
In the Millennium, the Great, the Good and the Well-Off may not need to enquire for whom the bell tolls in the ghettos, for by then it may also be tolling for both them and their children.
Robert McCartney MP is leader of the UK Unionist Party.