It is possible to reduce your protection money to a form of paramilitary ground rent.
I am aware of a café owner who stood up very publicly to loyalist demands, due to being too naively middle-class to realise how matters would escalate. He ended up facing down a gunman in full view of customers.
Embarrassed by this little rebellion, yet aware that shooting a grammar school boy is never classed as internal housekeeping, the local brigadier arranged a meeting and a nominal sum was agreed - I believe it was £1 a week - allowing face to be saved.
Other kinds of truce can be reached. My parents, who ran a small supermarket, always refused to pay protection money (or ‘donate to the prisoners fund’.) They were eventually punished with an armed robbery, during which my father was pistol-whipped. However, he managed to grab the gun while chasing his assailant out of the shop. This was handed over to the RUC, who pronounced it “a replica”, thus rendering the crime too minor to pursue the local brigadier who had obviously ordered it. That was the end of the protection demands. It was almost as if a meeting had taken place without us.
Pride and demonstrating community control are important to paramilitaries - ultimately they matter more than money, or rather, they are the basis on which money is demanded.
This week, the multi-agency Organised Crime Task Force, which includes the PSNI-led Paramilitary Crime Task Force, published its annual report and threat assessment.
It found PSNI information indicates loyalists and republicans, or individuals claiming to be from such groups, “continue to be actively involved in extortion attempts, particularly the racketeering of small businesses”.
The PSNI has chosen to highlight this section of the report, via a media statement by Detective Superintendent Bobby Singleton of the Paramilitary Crime Task Force.
The subtext of his statement is ‘this hasn’t gone away you know’.
One reason protection money has dropped off the radar is that we are no longer a nation of shopkeepers.
Although it sounds like something from a 1970s sitcom, shopkeepers were once the bedrock of bourgeois small town society. They ran the high street, where everyone shopped. The local establishment was drawn from their circles, from the council to the golf club. Protection money, along with bombings, put them at the sharp end of the Troubles and they were numerous and influential enough to keep their plight in the public eye.
But in the end they were wiped out by a change in the economy and their entire defining experience of the Troubles has been largely forgotten.
Most retailers today are national chains, beyond the reach of corner boy thuggery.
So the paramilitary targets have changed. Singleton gave a short list of examples: “nail bars, tanning salons, restaurants and fast food delivery”, along with the hardy perennial of building sites. He could have added “corner shops”, mentioned in a 2015 PSNI report on the same subject, with the growing number of shops set up by immigrants believed to be particularly vulnerable.
Protection money, in short, has moved from an attack on the middle-class to an attack on the working-class. In financial terms, paramilitaries have been reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel - picking on tiny, marginal enterprises.
But in social and economic terms this is an absolute catastrophe, crushing the very people whose success can best inspire and transform their communities.
The distance between victim and perpetrator has shrunk - a suburban force-field no longer separates them. They are likely to be from the same background, the same streets and to know each other personally, making the imperatives of pride and control more visceral, and the prospect of reprisals far more immediate.
Singleton said many businesses “fear the repercussions of engaging in the criminal justice process.”
No wonder: instances of what this involves rarely come to light but an exception occurred during a 2007 court case, after a north Belfast bar owner went to the police over UDA protection demands. She ended up losing her business, her home and having to move her family twice under witness protection when her details were obtained by the UDA.
Shopkeepers were always fearful of going to the authorities, even when they and the authorities were from the same background. How much worse is that fear now? Racketeering will never be solved by expecting victims to come forward. It must be tackled from the top down, by putting paramilitary leaders out of business.
newton@irishnews.com
