TURF WARS AND PROTESTS
In late March 2021, the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced that, having considered all the evidence and advice from senior counsel, there was ‘no reasonable prospect of conviction in respect of any of the reported individuals’ in relation to the funeral of Bobby Storey in June 2020. The evidence confirmed that the organisers of the funeral had engaged with the PSNI in advance about the funeral arrangements and that there was a large degree of confusion around conflicting and changing Covid-19 regulations at the time.
The decision not to prosecute leading SF politicians who attended was condemned by First Minister Arlene Foster, who called on Simon Byrne, the chief constable of the PSNI, to resign. This unprecedented demand by the first minister was followed by claims of two-tier policing against the loyalist community. The tensions surrounding the protocol and the wider talk of constitutional change undoubtedly contributed to the outbreak of loyalist violence on the streets of Belfast and in some towns across the North, which erupted in early April. The PPS decision not to prosecute leading republicans over their attendance at the funeral added another spark to the flame. In some loyalist areas, there were sustained attacks on police officers and vehicles during riots that took place in the days and nights leading up to the 23rd anniversary of the GFA on 10 April. Riots, involving mainly working-class teenagers, erupted across the North, including at the interfaces with nationalist areas in west Belfast, Derry, Carrickfergus and Coleraine.
For several nights just before Easter, there were confrontations with the police, with householders protecting their wheelie bins, preventing pavement slabs from being used as weapons. The most serious clashes took place on the peace line at Lanark Way, on the Shankill Road in Belfast, where young loyalists, some wearing black hoods and balaclavas, sought to entice nationalist youths on the Springfield Road to join in battle. Lines of people in the nationalist community faced abuse after they blocked angry youths from engaging with the loyalist attackers during the days and nights of rioting in west and north Belfast. Dozens of police officers were injured during the violence and cars and a bus were also set alight. One teenager was badly burnt by a petrol bomb which ignited his clothing as he was throwing another one at police. Older men associated with the UVF and UDA were identified encouraging and assisting the young loyalists to prepare petrol bombs.
According to Shankill Road community worker Eileen Weir, who spoke to journalist Susan McKay in the Irish Times in the days following the disturbances, the riots were organised through social media. ‘These young people out throwing fire-works and petrol bombs don’t know what they are doing,’ said Weir. ‘This is antisocial behaviour organised on Facebook and social media.’ She blamed the ‘disgraceful’ language of unionist political leaders which, she said, was ‘putting people on edge’. Weir accused DUP politicians of making incendiary comments: Sammy Wilson had threatened ‘guerrilla war’ on the protocol if it was not abandoned. His colleague at Westminster, Ian Paisley Jr, claimed that the Brexit protocol was to blame for the violence and that the decision by the PPS not to prosecute anyone for the breach of regulations surrounding the funeral of Bobby Storey in June 2020, was, he was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph as saying, ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.
In March 2021, LCC chair David Campbell announced that its members, the illegal UDA, UVF and RHC paramilitary groups, had withdrawn support for the Belfast Agreement over the protocol and warned that people should not ‘underestimate the strength of feeling on this issue right across the unionist family’. While insisting that protests should be ‘democratic and peaceful’, Campbell said that emotions were similar to those felt by unionists about the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.
On 9 April, the LCC declared in the Belfast Telegraph that none of its associated organisations ‘have been involved either directly or indirectly in the violence witnessed in recent days’. However, it also appeared to claim some influence over events when it successfully called for protests to be called off following the death of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth.
As historian Diarmaid Ferriter noted in an article for the Irish Times, unionist leaders have a long record of ‘falling back on a self-image of persecution’ which is being ‘wildly exaggerated’ as representative of half the population of the North. Ferriter wrote:
Following the Brexit referendum in 2016, DUP leader Arlene Foster decried the suggestion that it might damage the 1998 Belfast Agreement as ‘outrageous commentary’. It was nothing of the sort. The current DUP tactic of politicising policing issues – not helped by the arrogant and recklessly irresponsible organisation of the Bobby Storey funeral by republicans – and of criticising the recourse to violence while readily feeding loyalists a narrative of victimhood, is dangerously foolish and self-defeating. It makes a mockery of the idea that Northern Ireland during its centenary can strike a mature, inclusive pose.
Foster has been quick in the past to approvingly cite the assessments of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in relation to the IRA when it suited her political purpose; it is now, however, politically convenient for her to call for the resignation of the PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne.
Foster also sought to blame the Irish government for colluding with the imposition of the protocol and refused to nominate a unionist minister to attend a meeting of the NSMC in mid-April, which was intended to discuss the improvement of rail and other cross-border transport projects. Despite hardening her position and receiving an assurance, for what it was worth, from Boris Johnson that there would be no referendum on unity ‘for a very, very long time to come’ – as broadcast on BBC Spotlight on 20 April 2021 – the first minister was forced out of office after an internal party coup involving some of those most responsible for inflaming unionist and loyalist opinion against the protocol, the police and the GFA.
On the nationalist side of the interface with the Shankill Road, senior SF member and community leader Sean ‘Spike’ Murray spent several nights trying to stop young nationalists from taking on the loyalist rioters and was subjected to severe abuse for doing so. A former IRA prisoner, Murray had also attended Storey’s funeral and, in his view, there had been ‘a bit of opportunism’ in the criticism of SF deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, following her attendance and her breach of Covid regulations after she was photographed standing close to two mourners. ‘Michelle had done a great job dealing with the Covid-19 crisis and here was an attempt to criticise her,’ said Murray. ‘It didn’t work because the other political parties were giving her praise for the work that she was doing.’
The decision by the PPS not to prosecute anyone over their attendance did not surprise him as the organisers had met with senior PSNI officers in advance of the funeral and had agreed on the arrangements to ensure compliance with Covid-19 regulations. ‘There were a number of meetings between our people and PSNI senior command, as would happen … regarding any sort of big event, including sporting occasions,’ Murray said. He confirmed that appeals had been made for people to watch the service online. Thousands did, but thousands more joined the cortege and lined the streets of west Belfast for the funeral.
Murray described the scenes at the Lanark Way interface in the aftermath of the PPS decision:
We had protests at the interface for three days. The police didn’t adopt the right tactics on the first couple of nights. Part of the problem was a lot of their people who have the experience have now left the force. The community activists on our side have what is known as an interface strategy. This is meant to apply certain operational policies from a policing perspective. Senior police hadn’t a clue what we were talking [about] because they weren’t part of those discussions when it was agreed a number of years ago. We took some abuse, I can tell you.
Murray also engaged with community workers on the Shankill who were just as shocked at the sudden eruption of rioting. High unemployment and poor educational standards, as well as a criminal drug culture, are a fact of life in both communities, he said, and more co-operation and work are required to provide hope and opportunities for young people:
The real challenge is how to improve conditions and life opportunities for young people. The problem for the youth service providers is that they bring them into education courses, including basic English, vocational and other skills but there’s no employment at the end of that. It’s soul destroying for some of these kids. …
In many loyalist working-class areas, there’s no community infrastructure whatsoever. It is the same culture in some parts of the nationalist community. They’re not encouraged by their families to stay in education. A lot of kids who were in education lose focus and come out of the system because of drugs. They’re not getting a learning environment in the family home and it is difficult to create it outside. It’s a mirror reflection in the loyalist community which is why we’re saying to them we should be working together more closely on these issues.
However, co-operation across the community has been weakened by the crisis within political unionism and loyalism. Murray, along with Gerry Adams, met with loyalist leaders following the Easter riots to try to ensure they would not be repeated during the marching season. However, he said it is unclear whether the traditional political forces are as influential over the new generation of young loyalists: ‘Myself and Gerry Adams met with senior loyalists in June. We outlined the common issues of concern, on social deprivation. We planned two further meetings and they cancelled both.’
Other loyalists, including Jamie Bryson, are making inroads into the former strongholds of the UVF in east Belfast as unionism becomes more fractured, although Murray did not believe there is as large a stomach for confrontation as some have suggested, in either community.
It has not got gained any real traction. There’s no stomach for confrontation. We’ve been through this for so many years and young people are more interested in other things. We were out on the streets physically stopping our kids from fighting loyalists and we took abuse for it at Easter. You haven’t got the same level of leadership in the loyalist community because they are that fractured. I think that makes it more dangerous. You’ve got a turf war between former UVF factions in east Belfast. The UDA has broken down into fiefdoms on a geographical basis. The east Belfast UVF is now just a criminal gang. Some sections of the UDA are heavily involved in drugs as well.
The unity of the LCC is also under strain with some loyalist leaders unhappy with the inflammatory comments of its chair, David Campbell, and are threatening to leave the coalition, he said. Murray has engaged with loyalist community activists on a range of initiatives over the years, notwithstanding the current difficulties which are amplified by the debate over the unity referendum.
There has been a lot of change since the Good Friday Agreement, including demographic change, the growth of Sinn Féin North and South, especially in the South, while the whole debate about a united Ireland is going mainstream. Brexit has energised that debate.
We have to spell out a version of what we mean by a new Ireland, what type of education system, what type of a health and welfare system will we have, all the basics in life. We’re going to have to be able to answer those questions, and to sit down with unionists to try and reassure them regarding their sense of Britishness.
I’ve had some very good conversations with people like Glenn Bradley but there aren’t many Glenn Bradleys out there. A lot of pro-union people are afraid of having that conversation because they think, if they have, they are on a slippery slope to a united Ireland. I have worked well with [NIA’s] Tommy Winstone and other former loyalist prisoners, but once you hit the constitutional question it’s like they get lock jaw. They don’t want to discuss it.
You talk to some loyalist people and they can’t get around the fact that their forefathers were opposed to Home Rule and had a very strong link to the monarchy but who now feel let down and shafted by the British government. I think sometimes they’re just in a quandary, about who they are loyal to and who’s loyal to them.
This is where I think an organisation like Ireland’s Future could play a major role reaching out to people like that and having that discussion. If it’s coming from Sinn Féin, they’re not going to listen to it, they close their ears, but if it’s coming from others it can work.
Martin O’Brien is director of the Belfast-based Social Change Initiative, and former senior vice-president with Atlantic Philanthropies (AP), which financed the work of NIA and other projects aimed at empowering teenagers through education across both communities in the North. O’Brien has worked on peacebuilding and human rights for over 40 years. As part of its human rights strand, AP also promoted the reintegration of loyalist and republican ex-prisoners and facilitated dialogue between them. O’Brien was also involved in supporting the work of reducing tensions and preventing violence at the most volatile interfaces. He spoke to this author about the attempts community leaders, on both sides of the divide, made to de-escalate the Easter 2021 rioting in west Belfast:
Many of the people who were organising those human chains would have engaged with AP over the years. These groups are doing their best and people like Debbie Watters, Sean Murray and others in the loyalist and republican communities play a very significant role in trying to bring a bit of calm and a bit of reason in the loyalist community.
Now, you have a bus being driven by Jim Allister and Jamie Bryson and a lot of people are getting on to that bus. Others are trying to dissuade people from getting on but they’re doing it very quietly. It seems to me they’re afraid that they are going to be replaced by younger, more militant people. That, in a way, is the story of unionism.
Just look at this discussion on the protocol. Which prominent unionist is saying, ‘Look, lads, there’s an inevitability about this; this protocol isn’t going anywhere. There are things that are wrong with it, but we have to work through it’? None of them are saying that. It seems to me that there’s a real failure to face up to reality.
O’Brien pointed to a recent article by Bryson in the Unionist Voice where the GFA was identified as the root cause of all unionist woes, a view shared by Allister and which is gaining support across the unionist community. O’Brien contended that the reversion to blaming a peace settlement that was agreed by a solid majority of people in the North, is irrational. He referred to a book, How Britain Ends, by Scottish journalist Gavin Esler, which has a section about English nationalism. These people, Esler said, are suffering from a kind of melancholia about the loss of Empire and that it’s like a mental illness, he recalled.
For O’Brien, Esler’s description hit close to home:
Everything he [Esler] writes about the English Defence League you could ascribe to loyalism and that is, in part, what we’re dealing with. There is a level of irrationality with all of this because the truth of the matter is that the Good Friday Agreement is the best friend of unionists and loyalists. It basically says that, ‘In the future, if things change, your identity and rights have to be respected.’ That part of the Agreement is underexposed it seems to me.
Everybody’s fixated on the border poll but, regardless of the outcome, you have to be treated fairly and whoever is in charge has to respect your identity. It’s in the international agreement between the two governments. So why decide to bring down the Good Friday Agreement?
Concerned that the more reasonable voices within loyalism, and indeed unionism, are often reluctant to say anything in public that could expose them to criticism from the ‘seemingly more radical groups’, O’Brien submits that, ‘A very small group of quite extreme people, are saying what should be done and they’re setting the agenda very effectively.’
O’Brien feels that the current discussion of a future island is too often reduced to the binary options of staying within the UK or joining a unitary 32-county state:
The Good Friday Agreement doesn’t really help us in that regard because it does present those binary options, when in fact there is a range of things that you can do around federalism. Mad as it might seem, if you talk to loyalists or unionists around the border counties you hear farmers asking, ‘Well, are we going to lose our land?’ Kids at the bonfire are saying, ‘We’re not going to be able to have our bonfires any more.’ Both of those are far from likely but yet they are fears that are played on.
He has also observed that unionists are fearful of losing their majority in the Stormont assembly and SF becoming the larger party, a fear that has pushed the DUP, in particular, to the right and a more hard-line position against the protocol than it might otherwise have taken.
The debate on a unity referendum, said O’Brien, has added another focus to unionist anxieties:
Sinn Féin and people interested in moving this debate [on a united Ireland] forward are not in control of what other people say and do. But they are in control of what they do themselves. What are they doing to convince people who don’t think a united Ireland is a good idea? That to me is where this is going to be won or lost.
Supporting the development of deliberative processes, citizens’ assemblies and preferendums – referendums in which voters are offered choices between several options – could be very helpful, O’Brien has suggested:
Having an effective independent media which engages fully in the effort to explain, inform, question and educate is a key requirement especially when it comes to hugely significant choices and debates. There is also an obvious need for more community engagement and education around both developing proposals and engaging in their substance.
O’Brien argued that there is also a continuing need to support community-based peacebuilding:
The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement provides the bedrock for a sustainable peace but the important process of explaining it to a new generation and monitoring its implementation remains. Over the period since Brexit, we have seen threats of violence, street protests and the political use of the spectre of violence. However, less visible has been the tireless effort by many community activists, on all sides of our community, to prevent the escalation of violence. Their work needs to be recognised and acknowledged, but also supported through timely and flexible funding for local initiatives.