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History > 2013 > UK > Northern Ireland (I)
Northern Ireland intimidation
drives
hundreds from their homes
Number of
victims at five-year high,
and campaigner claims true figure may be higher
as
police reluctant to blame paramilitaries
Friday 27
December 2013
16.36 GMT
The Guardian
Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent
This article was published on the Guardian website
at 16.36 GMT on Friday 27 December 2013.
A version appeared on p34 of the Main section section
of the Guardian on Saturday 28 December 2013.
It was last modified at 00.08 GMT
on Saturday 28 December 2013.
The number
of people driven out of their homes by paramilitary and sectarian intimidation
in Northern Ireland is at a five-year high, according to figures obtained by the
Guardian.
Campaigners accuse the police of covering up the role of loyalist terror groups
that are supposed to be on ceasefire.
In 2012/13 there were 411 cases of individuals and families informing the
Northern Ireland Housing Executive that they were homeless because they had been
driven from their properties, according to figures from the public housing
authority.
That was a 36% increase on 2011/12 when there were 303 cases of victims seeking
to be rehoused. In 2008/9 there were 288 cases.
Raymond McCord, whose son was murdered by an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) unit
in north Belfast in 1997, and who campaigns against continuing paramilitarism,
said the true figures for those made homeless through terror and intimidation
may be three times as high.
He claimed that in many cases the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was
reluctant to sign forms apportioning blame to paramilitary movements that are
officially on ceasefire.
McCord said this was a problem especially for those who owned their homes and
who were not included in the Housing Executive statistics.
Under the Special Purchase of Evacuated Dwellings (Sped) scheme, the authorities
can buy back houses from people who have been intimidated into leaving their
homes. But in cases where the householders or families allege that paramilitary
groups were involved, a senior police commander has to sign a form stating which
organisation was responsible for the intimidation.
McCord cited the case of a relative of Bobby Moffett, who was murdered by the
UVF in 2010. "I dealt with the case of this lad who was beaten very badly
outside a bar earlier this year by members of the UVF on the Shankill Road," he
said. "They picked on him because he won't be silenced after what happened to
Bobby Moffett. After his beating he was informed he had to leave the Shankill
and sought to be rehoused elsewhere in Belfast.
"The PSNI refused to sign the Sped form that would have said the UVF was behind
this assault. This is because the chief constable, Matt Baggott, has said
recently that the UVF ceasefire has not been broken. Instead the police refer to
'criminal elements' being responsible for assaults like this. It does not look
good politically either for the PSNI or the Northern Ireland Office if an
official government Sped form states a certain paramilitary organisation was
behind the attack or ones like it."
McCord's battle to expose links between Royal Ulster Constabulary special branch
and elements of the North Belfast UVF in the murder of his son and up to a dozen
other deaths led to a damning report by the former police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan
which found collusion between loyalist informers and their police handlers.
McCord said the PSNI's refusal to confirm via the Sped forms that paramilitaries
were openly involved in intimidation and exiling denied victims a chance to
offload properties they could no longer live in.
He said his latest case involved a businessman in the Greater Shankill area who
faced demands from the local UDA for £100,000 in protection money. "This man may
have to move home and resettle elsewhere, so are the PSNI going to refuse to
officially acknowledge exactly who is behind this attempted extortion?"
One of the worst cases since 2012 has been that of Jemma McGrath, a 24-year-old
care worker who was shot in the stomach outside a house in east Belfast in
September this year. She had earlier been forced out of east Belfast by a local
UVF commander who has been behind a wave of criminality and sectarian violence
connected with the flags dispute over the last 12 months.
McGrath is a former partner of the UVF east Belfast "brigadier". After she fell
out with him she was subjected to a campaign of malicious gossip, forcing her to
flee to the north of the city. When she returned to the east on 25 September,
UVF gunmen were waiting and shot her four times.
McCord said of the Housing Executive figures: "In Greater Belfast alone, judging
the amount of cases, I would say it is double that figure. Across Northern
Ireland there are other incidents of intimidation and exiling going on. So the
figure is far, far higher than the Housing Executive's numbers."
Republican dissidents have been responsible for a spate of forced expulsions,
particularly in Derry, in the same period.
The PSNI said it took the issue of intimidation "very seriously". Responding to
McCord's allegations about senior police refusing to confirm paramilitary
groups' involvement on Sped forms, a spokesperson said: "The PSNI is required to
confirm that there is evidence to satisfy the second eligibility criteria,
namely 'that it is unsafe for the applicant or a member of the household
residing with him/her to continue to live in the house, because that person has
been directly or specifically threatened or intimidated and as a result is at
risk of serious injury or death'.
"The criteria has been set at a high level and in reaching a determination PSNI
takes care to consider all relevant information and applies the criteria fairly
and consistently. The assistant chief constable for operational support makes a
security assessment based on confidential information held by local police
regarding reports made by individual applicants. The individual is responsible
for reporting any incidents to the police as they occur."
The spokesperson said they could not discuss any individual's security, but "if
we receive information that a person's life may be at risk we will inform them
accordingly. We never ignore anything which may put an individual at risk."
Northern Ireland intimidation drives hundreds from their homes, G, 27.12.2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/27/
northern-ireland-sectarian-intimidation-figures
New Violence in Belfast
May Be About More Than the Flag
January 18,
2013
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
BELFAST,
Northern Ireland — For more than six weeks, it has been a dismal case of
back-to-the-future, a crudely sectarian upheaval that has defied all attempts at
peacemaking.
The scenes recall the sectarian bitterness that infused the 30 years of virtual
civil war known as the Troubles: night after night of street protests marshaled
by balaclava-wearing militants, who have updated their tactics by using social
media to rally mobs; death threats to prominent politicians, some of whom have
fled their homes and hidden under police guard; firebombs, flagstones and rocks
hurled at churches, police cars and lawmakers’ offices; protesters joined by
rock-throwing boys of 8 and 9; neighborhoods sealed off for hours by the police
or protesters’ barricades.
Many had hoped that the old hatreds between Northern Ireland’s two main groups —
the mainly Protestant, pro-British unionists, and the mainly Roman Catholic
republicans, with their commitment to a united Ireland — would recede
permanently under the auspices of the Good Friday agreement. That accord was
reached 15 years ago as a blueprint for the power-sharing government that now
rules the province.
But the fragility of those hopes has been powerfully demonstrated by more than
40 days and nights of violence that were triggered by a decision to cut back on
the flying of the Union Jack, Britain’s red, white and blue national flag, over
the grandly pillared, neo-Classical pile City Council building in central
Belfast.
By the latest count, more than 100 police officers have been injured, along with
dozens of protesters and bystanders. At times, the violence has expanded to
other cities, including Londonderry. Business has slumped. Police commanders,
their forces overwhelmed, have assigned dozens of officers to scan hundreds of
hours of closed-circuit video, looking for ringleaders.
The crisis began modestly enough. The Belfast council, its pro-British members
outvoted by a coalition of republicans and a small liberal bloc, decided in
early December to limit the flag flying to 18 days a year, as specified by
London for all of Britain. Through the decades when the council was dominated by
Protestant unionists, committed to links with Britain, the flag flew from the
pinnacle of the building every day of the year.
Incongruously, perhaps, most of those 18 days do not represent landmarks in
Britain’s history — Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, say, or Germany’s surrender
in the Second World War — but the birthdays of Queen Elizabeth II and her family
members, including the former Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, on
whose 31st birthday, Jan. 9, the Belfast flag fluttered for the first time since
it came down in early December. Under Britain’s strict rules about flying the
national standard on public and private buildings, not even the Parliament
buildings in London fly it on any but government-designated days. But the
hauling down of the Belfast flag provoked a furious reaction, the most
protracted period of unrest in many years in Northern Ireland.
Among pro-British loyalists, the episode was seen as part of the step-by-step
erosion of the British presence, a stripping of what many of them call their
identity. Other examples they invoke have also been symbolic, including moves to
delete the word Ulster — an ancient designation for the northern Irish provinces
commonly used by Protestants but mostly shunned by republicans — from the formal
names of the province’s police force and its military reservists, and to remove
the British crown emblem from the cap and shoulder badges of prison guards and
other public officials.
But many of the province’s political commentators see the flag dispute as a
token of something more profound and ultimately more threatening to the hopes
for a permanent peace here.
They say the council’s decision on the flag, made possible by the fact that
nationalists now hold 24 seats on the council, compared with 21 for the
unionists, reflects the rapid growth of the Catholic population in the years
since the Good Friday agreement, unsettling the long-held assumption among
unionists that Protestants would constitute a permanent majority in the
province.
The most recent census results, released last year, showed that 48 percent
listed themselves as Protestant or brought up Protestant, down 5 percentage
points from the 2001 census, while 45 percent of the population listed
themselves as Catholic or brought up Catholic, a 1 percentage point rise. In
Belfast, many say, Catholics are already a majority or nearly so and could form
a majority across the province within a decade.
Since the Good Friday agreement specified that the province would remain part of
Britain as long as a majority of the province’s people and of the population of
the whole of Ireland wished it to be, the reasoning goes, Protestants who are
resolved never to accept a united Ireland could be right in seeing the flag
dispute as a harbinger of their worst fears.
Patricia MacBride, a Catholic whose father was killed by loyalist gunmen and who
has been a leader in reconciliation efforts under the Good Friday agreement,
said she had always feared that the peace process might founder when Protestants
realized that the population numbers were moving against them. With the sense
that power was shifting away from them, she said, the sense of betrayal among
Protestants had intensified.
“There was always going to be something that triggered this upheaval,” she said.
“Increasingly, they feel abandoned by the state whose agents they have been for
so long.”
Strong backing for that view was evident on a recent morning in Belfast on
Shankill Road, a depressingly run-down loyalist stronghold notorious as a center
of sectarian ambushes, bombings and shootings during the Troubles. There the
Union Jack was everywhere, atop buildings, in shop windows, in tattoos and in
the hands of small children out shopping with their parents. In bars, cafes and
shops, “the humiliation” of the flag issue was the center of conversation. In
the winter chill, groups of men, mostly unemployed, reinforced one another’s
indignation.
On a stretch of the road punctuated with memorials to Protestants killed in the
Troubles and to Ulstermen who died in World War I, Paul Shaw, 33, owner of the
Shankill Band Shop, boasted of doing a roaring trade during the upheaval,
selling thousands of flags and other loyalist memorabilia, including DVDs of
patriotic songs sung by Ulstermen on the battlefields of the Somme.
“It’s our flag, our identity; it’s been flown above City Hall every day since
1906, and it’s being stripped from us,” he said. With nods from others clustered
around him, he compared the flag battle to the fighting on the Somme. “If we
lose this one, we’ll have a united Ireland in 5 or 10 years, and we won’t accept
it,” he said. “We’ll die to defend the flag. If we have to, we’ll go back to the
graveyards and the jails.”
With no end in sight, leaders of the power-sharing government have voiced
anxiety that the protests, by whipping up antagonism among Protestants, could
threaten the peace process. But the top two officials in the power-sharing
administration — Peter Robinson, the unionist first minister, and Martin
McGuinness, the republican first deputy minister, who is Mr. Robinson’s
effective coequal — vowed in the province’s assembly on Monday that their
commitment to the peace agreement would not be shaken. Mr. Robinson was
unsparing in his rebuke to the protesters. “You do not respect the union flag if
you are using it as a weapon,” he said, adding that the protests were “a cynical
cover for the real political agenda, which is to destroy the political process.”
Mr. McGuinness, a former chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army, seemed
eager not to draw sectarian comfort from the turmoil in the unionists’ political
base.
“I do not believe for a moment that they speak for the vast majority of
unionists,” he said of the flag protesters, dismissing their efforts as a crude
challenge to the power-sharing arrangements “from people who do not have a
mandate and speak for nobody but themselves.”
New Violence in Belfast May Be About More Than the Flag, NYT, 18.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/world/europe/
new-northern-ireland-violence-may-be-about-more-than-the-british-flag.html
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