Opinion

Allison Morris: Loyalist threat cannot be easily dismissed

The East Belfast Con Club where loyalists met this week
The East Belfast Con Club where loyalists met this week The East Belfast Con Club where loyalists met this week

With yet further delays in the disastrous Brexit process, the opportunity for healing the divisions caused by the most divisive referendum of our generation is once again kicked further down the road.

Public confidence in politics is at an all-time low and it will take years to rebuild any credibility of the political institutions, be they at Westminster or in Stormont.

The last-minute stunt pulled by the DUP this week, just hours before the introduction of new legislation on abortion and same sex marriage, has just added to the perception of a clown parliament.

The attempt to push through a private members bill – a process that usually takes months – in just a few hours, was always doomed to fail.

That the DUP waited until the day the legislation was to come into force, despite having known the deadline for months in advance, will all add to the feeling that this was little more than an act of self-preservation.

With a general election still the most likely outcome of the delayed Brexit process, and having already agreed in principle to a border in the Irish Sea, the party needed something to save face at the doors.

Meanwhile, on the ground the rumblings of discontent are turning into threats of violence on the streets.

Loyalists who believed Boris Johnson, with his hard-line Tory background, would stand in their corner were clearly very bad judges of character.

Johnson is an English nationalist who will always put career advancement over the union and who wants his legacy to be the leader who delivered Brexit, at whatever cost.

When the penny finally dropped with loyalists that Johnson was not their man in Downing Street, there was outrage at the proposed withdrawal agreement that will place the border around the island.

A DUP red line that cost Theresa May her career was, it seems, negotiable after all.

It was not the border but the mechanism of consent that was a deal breaker for unionists.

In the last three years there have been so many shifts from those who claimed it was their way or a hard Brexit that it’s difficult to establish what the cut-off point is any more.

Nothing is negotiable while at the same time everything is.

When several hundred loyalists gathered in east Belfast this week it was significant in that it included the leadership of factions who were at one time at war with each other.

It is easy for those who only know about loyalism through the prism of the Sunday tabloids to dismiss this threat as an irrelevance.

The daft nicknames given to many loyalist leaders at a time when it was simply too dangerous to name them in print has created caricatures that seem more cardboard cut-out gangster than threatening terrorist.

Loyalist paramilitaries would be unlikely to have the support and protection of the state agencies that they availed of during the Troubles if they were to return to violence.

But that doesn’t mean that they could not pose a major problem for the stability and security of Northern Ireland.

Loyalists continued to recruit long after they called a ceasefire.

While we often hear of the threat from dissident republican groups, who are considered a danger to national security, even the most generous assessment puts their numbers at somewhere around 500 members.

By contrast across the north loyalist paramilitary groups have retained thousands of members, many old and war weary but a significant number of them young men, disenfranchised from the political process and itching to cause mayhem on the streets.

During the flag protests of 2012 then Chief Constable Matt Baggott adopted a ‘least worst option’ approach to policing, which basically meant standing back and letting protesters bring the city to a nightly standstill.

A disastrous decision that cost the economy millions and allowed a protest that could have been ended in a week run on for months.

The latest chief constable, like Baggott, comes from an outside force.

If loyalist anger does spill onto the streets it will fall to Simon Byrne to consider how to approach that, and the orders he gives could have implications for us all for many years to come.