Try having a couple of your mates block a main road while you use a cherry-picker to hoist posters for a charity function. How long before somebody rings the police to complain?
They arrive and clear your mates out of the road and take everybody’s name because what you were all doing – obstructing a main thoroughfare - was illegal.
Now if you’re in the UVF or UDA try having a couple of your fellow gangsters block a main road while you use a cherry-picker to hoist flags of your terrorist organisation on DRD property. That’s OK. The PSNI will arrive and observe the proceedings in case you cause too much annoyance to motorists and maybe cause a breach of the peace. For those of you outside Belfast this is what happened a couple of years ago on the Ormeau Road.
Initially a police inspector said police were going to treat the outrageous festooning of flags as an offence. That was quietly overruled. Since then the police have turned a blind eye to the behaviour of loyalist terrorist groups marking out territory or worse still, establishing new territory.
Apart from that brief aberration in south Belfast the PSNI have been consistent in their disgraceful and unacceptable appeasement of loyalists’ illegal behaviour. In the last fortnight he PSNI response to the intimidation and expulsion of Catholics from their homes has been exactly what people expect: confused, patronising, contradictory and as usual, unacceptable.
In the first instance of course the police let the residents down with really stupid behaviour. Essentially what the PSNI did was to expedite the work of local loyalist terrorists. Instead of giving the UVF the bother of calling round to tell the people to get out the police did it for them. If it wasn’t police in the north you wouldn’t believe it but since it is police in the north you’re not in the least surprised. Did it ever occur to the police at least to stand guard at the families’ homes until the next morning after delivering bad news at midnight?
Did it ever occur to the police to arrest the leader of the UVF in east Belfast and his closest accomplices and take them in for questioning for directing terrorism?
For the police know full well as does everyone else in east Belfast who reads a newspaper who the leader is and who his mates are. Indeed the police know full well who the overall leader of the UVF is and who his mates are and where he lives and where they live.
Which brings us back fundamentally to the double standards of policing which have always operated here and still do. For the sake of argument, how long do you think a group of men would last blocking a main road to hoist IRA flags with ‘1919-21’ on them in small numerals claiming, ‘Ach sure, it’s the old IRA we’re talking about’? Ninety seconds maybe?
It took the chief constable over a week to emerge to announce what the famous Belfast dogs in the street knew, namely that the PSNI were effectively carrying out the work of the UVF when they passed on a threat which caused Catholic families to flee instead of protecting them. Now, as you may have gathered from previous press conferences by the chief constable he is a master of what is technically known as ‘the bleeding obvious’. He demonstrated that again by describing the dual role of loyalist terrorists – community workers by day paid by you and gangsters at night appeased by the police. He identified a pikestaff as plain. Masterly. He is expert at this.
The question remains what is he going to do? Answer came there none. Needless to say not a cheep from the DUP who insist on paying these gangsters as community workers. Silence from Sinn Féin who in an act of profound stupidity totally supported the disgraceful Social Investment Fund, slush money for paramilitaries.
This ambivalent attitude to paramilitaries by those who ran what used to pass for an administration in the north makes devising policies to eradicate terrorism problematical for the police who by rights should be closing down the publicly funded offices the UDA and UVF run their rackets out of.
