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Last
week Martin McGuinness presented a dossier to the
British and Irish governments detailing 160 incidents
of loyalist violence against Catholics over the past
three months. The document, which might as well have
been titled ‘But – themmuns!’ claimed
that British ‘securocrats’ control the UDA
and that Ulster Unionist politicians who have met
with loyalists should indicate when violence would
come to an end. However there were no recommendations
on how to deal with the situation, certainly no policy
suggestions and not even a reference to the proposed
anti-sectarianism legislation being considered by
the Secretary of State. The dossier was a depressing
reminder not only of the current level of loyalist
violence but of Sinn Fein’s utter uselessness
in confronting it. Still they’re hardly alone
on that score – nobody else seems to have a clue
either.
The
fate of the loyalist parties during and after the
Good Friday Agreement tells the tale. First the political
establishment promoted loyalism’s representatives
to an outrageous extent in the hope of creating a
‘balancing’ pro-agreement power bloc –
revealing an attitude in both London and Dublin that
loyalism is just the protestant version of republicanism.
This colonial mentality obviously views Northern Ireland’s
quarrel as a dispute between two indistinguishable
tribes where a solution applicable to one side will
be equally applicable to the other. Then the DUP panicked
and, in one of the most cynical acts of modern unionist
history, offered up the Reverend William McCrea to
LVF leader Billy Wright as a sort of sacrificial idiot
to see if there was any political mileage in an anti-agreement
loyalist position. Finally, disgusted with the entire
exercise, the wider unionist electorate rejected the
loyalist parties out of hand, definitively proving
that loyalism is not and never will be the mirror-image
of republicanism. The DUP learned its lesson and has
since inched, with identical cynicism but laudable
pragmatism, towards an anti-loyalist stance. However
nobody else learnt a thing – half-hearted attempts
to nurture ‘political loyalism’ continue
to this day.
Yet
the distinction between loyalism and republicanism
is transparently obvious. Unionists who wish to fight
for their country or protect their community join
the security forces – loyalism simply hoovers
up the dregs. Unionists can have no consistent sympathy,
however sneaking, for organisations which break British
law, kill British subjects and undermine Northern
Ireland and the union through crime and violence.
When unionists disavow loyalism we are not playing
presentational games – our self-righteousness
is quite sincere. Go and count David Ervine’s
ballots again if you don’t believe me - it won’t
take you long.
Yet
the British government holds back from seriously tackling
loyalism for fear of creating a ‘protestant backlash’.
There is possibly no greater insult to the unionist
people than this belief that, despite all electoral
evidence to the contrary, we remain loyalist sympathisers
at heart who will demand a green scalp for every orange
one. Even the complete absence of such demands during
tentative crackdowns has failed to sway this official
article of no-faith. A revealing example occurred
last year when the rump of the LVF robbed a bank in
Tandragee. Within days every possible culprit in mid-Ulster
had been lifted and questioned. Arrests, convictions
and long prison sentences followed and the LVF was
effectively wiped out in Portadown. If you don’t
recall hearing any screams of Unionist indignation
about this that’s because there weren’t
any. At the risk of sounding like a member of the
Worker’s Party it seems that after all the LVF
had done, all the people they had killed, they finally
crossed the line only when major business interests
were threatened. Re-drawing that line down the Deerpark
Road is not beyond the United Kingdom’s capabilities.
Sinn
Fein feels unable to call for security measures against
loyalists because of an ideological objection to British
rule in general and a stubborn hang-up over policing
in particular. Although Sinn Fein has already dumped
its ideological objections to partition, power-sharing
and Stormont the one compromise that would pressurise
the authorities into better-protecting its own constituents
is apparently beyond it. Instead Sinn Fein plays sectarian
victim politics for want of a better idea and bleats
about ‘securocrat collusion’ to maintain
the fiction that the British are still the real bad
guys, even though it is clear that the loyalists are
the bad guys and that Britain’s real clandestine
aim on that score is a misguided attempt to create
a loyalist version of Sinn Fein itself.
There
is something republicans can do about loyalist attacks
beyond compiling dossiers. They can end their cynical
wait for ‘community solutions’. They can
snap out of their fixation with dogma and openly demand
that specific action be taken. They can participate
in policing and force change. There will be no protestant
backlash.
Loyalist
violence is amenable, practically and politically,
to an aggressive security solution. Let’s see
Martin McGuinness call for that in his next report.
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