Northern Ireland ‘Political Instability Gives Legitimacy’ to Paramilitary Groups, MPs Told

People walk past a loyalist mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on March 13, 2012. (Peter Muhly/AFP)

Paramilitary groups are likely to be thrive on the “political instability” surrounding the Northern Ireland Protocol and the impasse at Stormont after the Democratic Unionist Party refused to join the governing executive, MPs have been told.

The DUP has refused to take up positions in the Northern Ireland Executive in protest at the post-Brexit trade deal which effectively placed a border in the Irish Sea.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss outlined plans to change the protocol earlier this week but Sinn Fein said her proposals would break international law.

Duncan Morrow, a politics professor and director of community engagement at Ulster University, told Parliament’s Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on May 18 the “ongoing political controversy” had created a “climate of legitimacy” for paramilitary groups.

Siobhan McAlister, a senior lecturer in criminology at Queen’s University in Belfast, said, “At times of political instability violence reignites, support for these [paramilitary] groups is given more legitimacy so we can’t forget the power of those legacy issues to disrupt.”

‘Clarion Call to Violence’ on Social Media

The chairman of the committee, Conservative MP Simon Hoare, asked the academic experts who were giving evidence whether social media networks were doing enough to prevent incitement to violence in Northern Ireland.

He read out a message that had been posted on Facebook, which he described as a “clarion call to violence and illegality.”

Quoting from the message, Hoare read: “Loyalist paramilitaries should now be thinking of joining as one army. Forget all the jealousy and feuds and backstabbing. The people of our country are calling for unity. I believe this should start in the ranks of men who are prepared to stand, fight and win, which there is no doubt they will. United Ireland is a pipe dream and Sinn Fein know it. If England won’t stand with us we will stand alone. We’ve done it before and we will do it again. Politicians are not to be trusted.”

Colm Walsh, a research fellow in social sciences at Queen’s University, said he was “not surprised” by the incitement in the Facebook post and he said there was “no easy answer” about whether social media companies were doing enough to prevent it.

Morrow said young people were facing “amplification” of coercion on social media and he said it should be a “wake-up call.”

The committee hearing came as the British government published the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, which is an attempt to deal with more than 1,000 unsolved killings from The Troubles, the period between 1969 and 1998 when the Provisional IRA sought to force a united Ireland and were opposed by loyalist paramilitaries.

Although the IRA, the INLA, and the two main loyalist groups, the UVF and UDA, have ostensibly laid down their arms and disbanded, the committee heard that they still exist in some form in certain republican and loyalist areas of Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland.

Walsh said he had conducted research in 2019 that found young people were still being exposed to violence at the hands of paramilitary groups.

He said, “The ways that young people experienced violence had shifted slightly but actually the rates of exposure and the prevalence of exposure to violence in various forms, from low-level to higher harm organised crime and paramilitary violence was still very much present … and it affected their thoughts of their own personal safety.”