Fourthwrite .......................Issue No. 11

  The sectarian monster      

by John McAnulty

Anyone seeking to understand the rise in sectarianism over the past year and a half in the North of Ireland should cast their mind back to the picture of a terrified school girl screaming in fear as a blast bomb was thrown at her outside Holy Cross primary school. At that point there was a curious double vision. On the one hand this was naked bigotry, which all civilised people would oppose. On the other hand it was an example of community conflict, which required negotiation and concessions to loyalism. From that point on what should be one story becomes two. The first is the story of loyalist reaction. The second is the story of the response by other sectors of Irish and British society to the naked sectarianism of the bigots.

It's worth reminding ourselves of the nature of loyalist gangs. The UDA, UVF and the LVF are criminal sectarian gangs in most cases, set up, supplied and run by the British state forces. They have never been able to demonstrate any significant level of political support from the Protestant working class. In between sectarian murders they prey upon the Protestant population with extortion, drug dealing and prostitution. The UDA usually do not pretend to have any political dimension. Their two interests are naked sectarianism and the criminal control of the local turf. The UVF have frequently been presented as the political loyalists on the strength of two or three spokespersons able to string of few words together and a long history of communication with Fascist groups in Europe. However, when what they say is examined, it turns out to be a thin gruel of loyalist populism, criticising the well-off unionists for not being loyalist enough and for leaving the dirty work to the sectarian gangs.

All this was to change with the Good Friday agreement. The British insisted that the sectarian gangs would be included in the political process. A fast track electoral procedure was devised to ensure that the loyalist groups would be elected to the convention that preceded the Stormont assembly on tiny votes. This public prominence, plus massive British funding was to establish their political careers.

Almost immediately the sectarian gangs began to fall out of   politics. The UDA could not win a place in Stormont and PUP elected only its two main spokespersons - their vote has been declining every since. The UDA proved so bad at politics that they forgot to register as a political party at the last election. They announced that they were going back to what they knew best - in fact they had never stopped racketeering.  They dissolved their front party, the UDP, and announced that they no longer supported the Good Friday agreement.

 In fact, because of the sectarian structures built into the Good Friday agreement, there was increasing sectarian rivalry between the unionist parties. Each fought hard to establish that they were the biggest bigots and deserved the biggest share of the vote and they were not slow to recruit the respective paramilitary muscle to their cause, the UDA lining up with Paisley's DUP and the UVF providing muscle for Trimble's UUP.

A mad scramble began for turf and influence between the two main loyalist paramilitary groups. The outward indication was the battle of the flags, where the UDA and UVF marked out their respective territories with sectarian banners and graffiti. Around this time the UDA, which in any case had never ceased a low level of sectarian intimidation across the North, began to prove its point with more organised attacks on the Catholic population with the major attacks in Belfast's Springfield Road. A mural appeared on the Shankill road listing loyalist sectarian atrocities with the slogan ' wouldn't it be great if it were like this all the time'. In a pattern that was to become familiar, some unfortunate Protestant pensioners saw their homes damaged by mystery attackers.

The battle of the flags exploded into a major conflict when a drug gang in Portadown, the LVF, split from the UVF and went over to the UDA. The loyalists started dishing out to each other what they routinely delivered to the Catholic population. When the dust settled hundreds from each group had been forced to move out of their home areas. They immediately started to carve out new areas of turf to control in the ways that they knew best. When the UVF intersected the existing sectarian tensions of north Belfast at Glenbryn the siege Holy Cross began.

Since then we have had holy Cross one, holy Cross two, parts of Antrim and Larne declared 'Taig Free zones'. A whole series of military operations were carried out openly in North Belfast, with squads of paramilitaries launching mass attacks on Catholic areas. In one such attack a whole row of houses was petrol bombed, with one burnt completely to the ground. Fire and ambulance crews who tried to help the residents were themselves the subject of a carefully planned ambush in which a number of crew were injured.

The siege of Short Strand began with five blast bombs thrown simultaneously into the area at 4.00 in the morning. Shortly afterwards loyalists invaded a local college and began applying crude sectarian tests to round up the Catholic students. They picketed the local doctor’s surgery, demanding that Catholics be refused medical treatment.  A wall mural declared that Catholics enter the Newtownards Road at their own risk. In North Belfast squads of armed thugs roamed the streets, with five attempts at sectarian murder in one night. One was successful - that of Gerard Lawlor.  Earlier the Loyalist commission had drawn up a 'no first strike' policy, which precisely justified the random sectarian attacks by the UDA. Observers routinely underestimate the depth of savagery of loyalists and the strong stomachs of their political fellow-travellers.  A picture taken of the spot where Danny McColgan died showed a policewomen gathering flowers.  No one explained that the loyalists had just torn them down.  It was hardly a surprise that the bigots followed McColgan’s coffin to the graveyard, smashing up his and other catholic gravestones and smearing sectarian taunts.

How can this be? How can loyalists act with such impunity? The answer is very simple. They can count on the collusion of the state and of many supposedly respectable elements of society. After all, a Panorama investigation of the killing of lawyer Pat Finucane showed that the UDA man who planned the killing, the man who provided the guns and the man who carried out the killing were all British agents and that they acted on information provided by the British army. The idea that the UDA is autonomous from the British state is a story for the gullible or the deliberately blind.

At the height of the loyalist feud, churchmen and members of the unionist leadership rushed to sponsor talks between the loyalist factions.  No one seemed to think that the demands for republican decommisioning, a central crisis for the Good Friday agreement, should apply to the loyalists. No one thought it strange that these dignitaries should be so anxious to rescue the sectarian thugs.  Peter Mandelson, then Secretary of State, denounced the feud as a war between criminal gangs over turf. The following day he welcomed the success of the loyalist commission in negotiating a ceasefire.  Why should the state welcome a deal between sectarian gangs? His successor, Reid, agonised for months while the paramilitaries launched sectarian attacks, wondering if the UDA was still on ceasefire! Only when a figure looking suspiciously like Johnny Adair danced in the middle of the Shankill Road waving a sub machine gun was Adair thrown in jail and the UDA declared to be off the ceasefire.  An outcome of the feud was that unionism stepped in to front for the Loyalists.  The Loyalist commission had at its heart two senior advisors to David Trimble, a number of churchmen and senior paramilitaries. From then on the unionists were to help make the sectarian gangs respectable and use them to advance their own sectarian demands.

At Holy Cross the paramilitaries realised that they were on a win win situation. The RUC defended their right of to carry out sectarian intimidation and forced children and parents to walk a gauntlet. Unionist politicians and the Loyalist Commission forced forward their demands for apartheid. The British response was to concede part of the apartheid demands by sealing the Catholics behind high walls. Substantial funds were diverted from public services into the pockets of the paramilitaries. Secretary of State Read announced that 'Northern Ireland' was a cold house for Protestants. Faced with these concessions the loyalists stepped up their activities. At the very least a few shillings would be slipped into their pockets and was very likely that with each incident they would get some of their demands accepted.

  A standard Sinn Fein picture is that a few paramilitaries are in conflict with a united front of supporters of the Good Friday Agreement. This is nonsense. David Trimble dances a sectarian jig in front of Short Strand. The RUC hint that more public support (i.e. Sinn Fein support for the police) may lead them to close down loyalist violence. Meantime, the British publicly warn Sinn Fein that they must make more concessions to loyalism

The sectarian violence in the north of Ireland is not mindless. It has a political purpose. Loyalists demand that Catholics not be allowed to live and work where they wish. Unionists demand that the IRA be disbanded and Sinn Fein thrown out of government. The British also demand IRA disbandment on a slightly longer time scale. Their immediate demand is for Sinn Fein support for the renamed RUC, a demand they have had endorsed by Dublin and Washington

There appears to be no organised opposition. A proper opposition would have to oppose the loyalist sectarian gangs, acknowledge that it was their activity that was driving the sectarian violence and denounce the collaboration of the unionist organisations and the British state. The organisation most often put forward as a focus of opposition to sectarianism, the trade union movement, immediately supports the definition of the problem as community conflict. That enables it to demobilise the occasional waves of mass revulsion that follow a particular brutal atrocity, propose partnership with the British state and local politicians in a milk and water peace movement and offer its negotiating skills to the loyalist killers. Immediately following the killing of Gerard Lawlor the trade unions rushed to meet his killers and assured them that they were not opposed to the sectarians of the UDA - just sectarianism in general. Even then the trade unions were almost outdone by Sinn Fein, who also rushed to meet Gerard Lawlor's killers and joined with the trade unions to organise a peace rally even more vacuous and hypocritical than those aimed against republicanism of the height of the troubles.

Those who want to fight sectarianism must realise that the issue is not peace. The British and the unionists will give us peace. All that is required is that we give the sectarians what they want - to lie down. Then we will have the peace that the north of Ireland had in the 1950s. The peace of a sectarian hellhole wholly innocent of any human rights. Those who turn in revulsion from such a picture should demand no engagement with loyalism and oppose collaboration between the British state and loyalist gangs. They should oppose the capitulation of Dublin and all the nationalist parties and above all they should oppose the Good Friday Agreement. The hell that is opening before our eyes is not the breaking of the agreement. It is the agreement coming into flower with the reality of copperfastened sectarianism and partition.

Opposition is not impossible. The killing of Danny McColgan was followed by the mobilisation of tens of thousands of working people. The fact that many did not return to later demonstrations doesn't mean that they have changed their minds. It means that they realise that they don't have an effective leadership. Building a movement that offers the alternative of socialism and solidarity must be the order of the day.