IF it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck and so it is with the UDA.
Like many people in Northern Ireland I am fed up to my ‘oxters’ of slush funds made up from taxpayers' money being provided to wean loyalist paramilitary organisations away from their criminal activities.
The concept of the Social Investment Fund (SIF) may have been a good idea when put down on a piece of paper but it’s an idea that’s gone sour.
Since the start of the peace process there has always been an element that has involved paying for the ‘buy in’ of paramilitaries.
It seemed a worthwhile price if it bought peace. The problem now is that there seems no end in sight to the payments.
As a citizen, civilian and non-combatant, I never bought into the nonsense that we were all somehow involved or responsible for the violence, mayhem and discrimination that went on before, during and after the Troubles.
It’s a narrative that suited loyalists and republicans. I was not alone, the clear majority of the 1.7 million people in Northern Ireland were not involved either but it has not stopped us picking up the tab for these wayward sons of Ulster and Erin who were.
But it’s time to stop it. Combatants, legal and illegal, made victims of us all during the Troubles and now their representatives seem determined to rub our faces in it even more by pensioning off their former comrades in arms with public money.
The most recent debacle over Charter NI is quite timely for it brings into question the morality of why our executive is still putting public funds into the hands of former and not so former paramilitaries.
The £80 million slush fund officially known as the Social Investment Fund is a complete waste of public money.
If the electorate were asked whether they would prefer that the money from SIF went into providing support for the NHS or loyalist paramilitaries, the answer would be a no brainer. But our executive has no intention of asking the public what they think.
Mr Stitt, the embattled CEO of Charter NI, seems to have what we colloquially call a brass neck.
His organisation has received almost £2 million of public funds. Given that we are 22 years on from when the loyalists allegedly called a ceasefire, like many others I am puzzled about just how long one remains defined as an ex-prisoner?
Poor old ODCs or ordinary decent criminals don’t get anything like the level of re-settlement support that is given to ex- thugs, racketeers and drug pushers from loyalist paramilitary organisations.
Ordinary decent criminals unlike their paramilitary counterparts may have made one mistake that changed their lives but they still must compete in the labour market against the rest of the population.
On the other hand, former paramilitaries are feted. Senior politicians are even queuing up to be pictured with them.
The whiff of sulphur brings with it a peculiar form of Northern Ireland celebrity- the ex-paramilitary hard man.
They emerged from the shadow of the Troubles only to cast their ominous shadows over us in their new-found publicly funded jobs as ‘community leaders.’
Stitt has been reported as calling loyalist estates ‘jungles’. What an insult to the ordinary working people across Northern Ireland who like me grew up in housing estates with good neighbours and a strong sense of community.
The UDA wore down good estates and leeched off the backs of the decent people living there.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the NI Executive and the NIO live in a Narnia where loyalist paramilitaries are portrayed as benign Del Boys or loveable rogues like Arthur Daley.
The attitude of the PSNI hierarchy towards the UDA seems to be governed by a permanent state of implausible deniability.
When it comes to loyalist involvement in racketeering, drug dealing and intimidation there’s an official blind spot.
The rationale is the that the poor old loyalists were not as clever as their republican counterparts in cute hoorism so they need a helping hand.
The notion of rewarding or compensating paramilitaries of any hue is an anathema to the overwhelming majority of people In Northern Ireland.
We all lived through the Troubles created by these people and they made choices - choices that few of them afforded to their victims.
No one forced a gun into their hands and they should not expect us to hand over our hard-earned cash to bolster their lifestyles now.
