There is little doubt that many of the poorest in Northern Ireland live in areas which have suffered greatly during the long years of inter-community strife and conflict. Many would accept that the poverty and disadvantage endemic within such communities has led to a sense of limited opportunity and limited investment in the future. In such an environment it is easy to see why so many young people were drawn into violence and paramilitarism.1
‘Lifetime Opportunities’ – UK Government
Anti-Poverty Strategy for Northern Ireland, 2006
The dangers of the imposition of inequality and poverty are compounded in a divided society where they fuel and facilitate conflict. Discrimination and general assaults on economic and social rights were a root cause of the violent conflict that ensued from the late 1960s following the suppression of civil rights protests. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement and its implementation agreements at least recognised that reversing long-standing patterns of inequality were a premise for a lasting peace. A coach and horses is now being driven through this premise by the imposition of austerity and the sidelining of the equality agenda. Austerity threatens to deepen poverty and widen the inequalities that the UK government itself argued needed to be tackled to stifle the attraction of paramilitarism. It does so in a context in particular where there is a sense within loyalist communities of a loss of dominant position, and the involvement of sections of loyalist paramilitarism in orchestrated racist violence.
This chapter examines these developments culminating in the institutional crisis created by the imposition of austerity that led to the structural adjustment-type 2014 Stormont House and 2015 Fresh Start Agreements.
Northern Ireland was created by the partition of Ireland in the 1920s. Fifty years into the majoritarian Stormont Parliament the polity slipped into conflict and collapsed. The British government set up the ‘Cameron Commission’ to ascertain just what were the ‘immediate causes and nature of the violence and civil disturbance in Northern Ireland on and since 5th October 1968’. The Commission conclusions list the first cause as the ‘rising sense of continuing injustice and grievance among large sections of the Catholic population’ over the inadequacy of housing provision, unfair methods of allocating houses and misuse of discretionary powers by some Local Authorities. It was followed by complaints that it considered to be ‘now well documented in fact’ of ‘discrimination in the making of local government appointments, at all levels but especially in senior posts, to the prejudice of non-Unionists and especially Catholic members of the community, in some Unionist controlled authorities’. It also recorded ‘Fears and apprehensions among Protestants of a threat to Unionist domination and control of Government by increase of Catholic population and powers.’2
Following the removal of the then Stormont Parliament in 1972, decades of ‘direct-rule’ from London ensued which were characterised by attempts at reform, in particular by the introduction of ‘fair employment’ anti-discrimination legislation and the removal of housing powers from local government to an independent authority duty bound to allocate housing on the basis of objective need.
This was unfinished business at the time of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The agreement provided for a new statutory equality duty that obliged all new or revised policies to be assessed for their impact on equality; enhanced fair employment legislation; measures to tackle the unemployment differential on the basis of objective need; ‘affirmed’ (but provided no framework for) the full and equal political participation of women; guaranteed the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into Northern Ireland law; and provided for a binding ECHR+ Bill of Rights for meeting the particular circumstances of the jurisdiction. Provisions which were properly implemented enjoyed a degree of success, for example, in tackling the unemployment differential between Catholics and Protestants. Other measures were, however, rolled back or not implemented at all. In 2008 the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, itself a product of the Good Friday Agreement, issued its final advice to the UK government on the content of the Bill of Rights, urging the inclusion of economic and social rights. The following year a UN Committee appealed to the UK to enact a Bill of Rights ‘without delay’.
Years of delays to this process have, however, followed. The regular crises threatening to collapse the political process led to further UK-Ireland Agreements, including the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, which foresaw a single equality bill, an Irish Language Act and an anti-poverty strategy based on the principle of objective need. Although the power-sharing institutions of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had been regularly suspended, the period immediately following the 2006 St Andrews Agreement was one of relative stability.
This period of stability was all to change with the imposition of austerity and particularly the political demands for similar social security cuts to those imposed in Britain. The power-sharing government has been destabilised and at some points seemed likely to implode.
Following weeks of crisis talks on 23 December 2014 the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Theresa Villiers MP, published the ‘Stormont House’ Agreement. Its first section essentially contains a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) for the jurisdiction providing for: a ‘balanced budget’ (i.e. cuts to public spending); ‘Public Sector Reform and Restructuring’ including a ‘Voluntary Exit Scheme’ for up to 20,000 public sector jobs to be funded by borrowing of up to £700 million and an OECD review; implementing the cuts to the welfare state introduced in Britain, but with a top up mitigation fund for existing claimants; powers over Corporation (profits) Tax with a view to lowering the rate to 12.5 per cent and consideration of privatisation of public assets. In publishing the Agreement, the Secretary of State described it as ‘historic’, providing a ‘new approach to some of the most difficult issues left over from Northern Ireland’s past’.
The two Irish nationalist parties – Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), had resisted the imposition of social security cuts and other austerity policies and along with the Greens voted down the passage through the Northern Ireland Assembly of legislation equivalent to Britain’s Welfare Reform Act 2012. The response from Whitehall was belligerent: economic sanctions against the power-sharing administration to the tune of £2 million a week were imposed. There was no legal basis for these officially termed fines or penalties. London simply decided to cut that amount from the block grant the Northern Ireland Executive receives from the UK Treasury each year. Austerity led to the institutions regularly teetering on the brink of collapse. The Executive at one stage passed a ‘fantasy’ budget which balanced the books by overlooking a £600 million hole created by both the sanctions and other cuts. The Stormont House deal was ultimately struck to stave off the collapse of the institutions, yet as quickly as the ink had dried it unravelled with disagreements over the terms of a transitional fund to mitigate against the worst impacts of welfare ‘reform’. Further cuts imposed by Chancellor George Osborne following the May 2015 election meant that even Stormont House would no longer balance the books. After further months of crisis talks an implementation deal dubbed the 2015 ‘Fresh Start Agreement’ was concluded, an Agreement which sets out that £3.7 billion of ‘savings’ had already been imposed on the Stormont budget.
This raised alarm bells amongst public sector institutions already burdened by the harmful austerity effects. At an anti-austerity conference, one UNISON researcher warned that nearly half of the ‘savings’ proposed by health Trusts were being vetoed by the Public Health Agency as they put patient safety at risk.3 The same conference heard evidence that one in five children could expect to be living in poverty for most of their childhood (twice the rate in Britain; see also Chapter 7 by Joanna Mack). It is worth noting the uneven geographical concentration of these poverty levels: the most severe geographical concentrations of this poverty can be found in the same areas that bore the brunt of a conflict rooted partly in legacies of discrimination and deprivation.4
Unofficial research into the implications of the deal on sectarian inequality commissioned by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and trade unions found that:
the economic model made explicit in the financial annex of the Stormont House Agreement is likely to deepen and widen inequality – both generally (between richer and poorer people) and in terms of the differences between Protestants and Catholics.
The authors go on to warn that if care is not taken in implementing the Agreement
there is a risk that a carefully established political settlement which aimed to move Northern Ireland from a less to a more inclusive society could be unravelled with a very clear financial and social cost to nearly two decades of peace-building.5
As evident in the 1960s, people can only put up with certain levels of inequality and poverty before something breaks. In the post-peace process context, the lessons of history are being set aside for austerity. The impacts of elements of the Stormont House Agreement are predictable. The elephant-in-the-room impact of welfare cuts is that, by definition, the cuts will hit persons most in need. In Northern Ireland this means that they will exacerbate existing inequalities and disproportionately affect Catholics. While the cutting of public sector jobs with a view to shift employment in the private sector has gender implications for equal pay, it also has ‘fair employment’ implications. Equality Commission data shows that there are still 267 firms with less than 30 per cent of Catholic employees and 161 firms with less than 30 per cent of Protestant employees in the private sector, which compares unfavourably with the public sector where the comparative figures are 16 and 7, respectively (and only two of these bodies are major employers).6 Couple this with the reality that areas of high deprivation, which bore the brunt of the conflict, tend to be areas that do not benefit from private sector investment and are more reliant on public sector employment. The risks of structural adjustment exacerbating and regressing long-term patterns of inequality which were meant to be dealt with as part of the peace settlement are plain.
The ‘structural adjustment’ measures were, however, to be introduced in the context where all new policies are to be subject to legally binding duties to assess their impacts on equality. Such processes have too often been sidestepped. There has been no overarching assessment of the impacts of the voluntary exit scheme or the Stormont House Agreement itself. In relation to the Welfare Reform Bill, the equality impact assessment managed to miss out four of the nine discrimination categories (namely, religious belief, racial group, political opinion and sexual orientation), thus duly disguising equality impacts across those four categories.
This is occurring in a context whereby ten years on key equality provisions committed to in the 2006 St Andrews Agreement have not been delivered, including the adoption of an anti-poverty strategy on the basis of objective need, a matter subject to a successful judicial review by the Belfast-based human rights NGO, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) in 2015.7 Meanwhile the Northern Ireland Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey found that in 2012, 32.5 per cent of Catholic families were in poverty compared to 18.5 per cent of Protestants, and that the gap had in fact widened in the preceding decade.8
Austerity can be used as cover to unravel peace settlement safeguards in other ways. In 2015, as part of the programme of public sector cuts, there was a push to dispense with the entire function of an independent human rights scrutiniser for the Policing Board. In general, austerity is a key vehicle for the opponents of accountability to quietly dismantle key safeguards that have been built up as part of the process of institutional reform.
Paramilitary involvement in orchestrated racist violence predates austerity, yet in recent years it has certainly fed off the effects of austerity. In a 2011 report to the UN anti-racism committee, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission – itself a product of the Good Friday Agreement – raised continued concerns regarding evidence of orchestrated racist violence involving elements of loyalist paramilitarism. Their report describes the then ‘Independent Monitoring Commission’ on paramiliatary activity in rather understated terms, declaring it would be an ‘important step’ for loyalist paramilitaries to ‘stop targeting [Irish] nationalists and members of ethnic minorities’. The practice of burning things that represent Catholics on some loyalist bonfires has been augmented by similar attacks on migrant communities, with incidences of Portuguese and Polish flags being burned alongside Irish tricolours.
In April 2014 the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) expressed concern at a 70 per cent increase in hate crime in the city of Belfast, and when asked whether an organisation was behind the attacks, Assistant Chief Constable Will Kerr told the Policing Board, ‘yes’, elaborating,
we think that the [loyalist paramilitary] UVF at least in south Belfast are undoubtedly behind orchestrating some of these racist attacks. Some of the motivation behind that is social housing based which worries us because it has a deeply unpleasant taste of ethnic cleansing in parts of Belfast that could cause us all some concern.9
The human stories that lie behind the statistics provide a stark illustration. In June 2014 a Nigerian man, the victim of a racist attack in 2011 where stones and bottles were hurled at him, was allocated social housing in East Belfast, only to find a racist picket on the doorstep and the unfurling of ‘Houses 4 local people’ and ‘We need homes 2’ banners. The response from the then MP Naomi Long of the centrist Alliance Party in describing the incident as ‘blatantly racist behaviour’ was not universal across the political establishment. The then Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) First Minister, Peter Robinson, supported the protestors and maintained their actions were neither racist nor intimidating. Later in 2014, when the Ulster Unionist Mayor of Portadown praised migrant workers for their contribution to the town, a DUP councillor responded in the media that the town had been ‘swamped’ by foreign nationals, that local infrastructure had been ‘stretched to the limit’, implying migrants were a ‘drain on the health service’ and local schools, and claiming the matter was ‘the hottest topic in Portadown’. Soon after this a loyalist political party closely associated with the paramilitary UVF issued its own press release demonising migrants. Shortly afterwards there were attacks on Roma groups in the town. Some families fled. Graffiti then appeared in a prominent signboard announcing, ‘Roma out – last night was only the start’.10
The phenomenon of migrants being violently scapegoated for the slide in living standards of significant sections of the population in recent years has been energised by the context of the ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign. While this mix of legitimised anti-migrant racism and attacks provoked by austerity-fuelled inequality (see also Chapter 24 by Jon Burnett) is not leading us back to the type of armed conflict that existed before the 1994 ceasefires, it is creating a new lease of life for paramilitarism. Austerity has therefore fuelled the re-emergence of a violence that cannot hope to sustain the vision of a fully peaceful society.
Websites were last accessed 30 September 2016.
1. Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister, Lifetime Opportunities: The UK Government’s Anti-poverty and Social Inclusion Strategy for Northern Ireland, Belfast: Northern Ireland Department Central Anti-Poverty Unit, 2006, para. 28.
2. Government of Northern Ireland, Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission Appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland (Cameron Commission), Cmd 532, Belfast: HMSO, 1969, available at: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/hmso/cameron.htm#contents
3. Jonathon Swallow, ‘Cuts to the health sector’, in Austerity and Inequality: A Threat to Peace? Conference Report, Belfast: Equality Coalition, October 2015, pp. 71–2.
4. Goretti Horgan, Northern Ireland Child Poverty Alliance and Ulster University, ‘Child poverty’, in Austerity and Inequality: A Threat to Peace? Conference Report, Belfast: Equality Coalition, October 2015, pp. 73–4.
5. Christine Bell and Robbie McVeigh, ‘A fresh start for equality?’ The Equality Impacts of the Stormont House Agreement on the ‘Two Main Communities’, Belfast: Equality Coalition, 2016, para. 10 executive summary and p. 11.
6. Ibid., pp. 32–3.
7. The Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) and Brian Gormally’s Application [2015] NIQB 59.
8. Gabi Kent, ‘Shattering the silence: the power of purposeful storytelling in challenging social security policy discourses of “blame and shame” in Northern Ireland’, Critical Social Policy, 36 (1), 2016, 124–41.
9. See ‘UVF “behind racist attacks in south and east Belfast”: loyalist paramilitary group behind attacks says PSNI’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 April 2014; Robbie McVeigh, ‘Living the Peace Process in reverse: racist violence and British nationalism in Northern Ireland’, Race & Class, 56 (4), 2015, 12.
10. Ibid., p. 9.