A View North Shocking! Paramilitaries running North’s rackets

By Jack Holland

The reaction to the Report on Organized Crime in Northern Ireland, published last week, was, like so many things to do with that place, predictable. It was also often self-deceptive, but then that too is typical of how people there deal with unpleasant truths.

Decent people such as the SDLP’s Alban Maginness, the party’s assembly member for North Belfast, called the report "shocking reading."

"It is clear from the findings contained in the report that Northern Ireland has not escaped the murky underworld of crime gangs," said Maginnis, who, a few years back, became the first Catholic to be lord mayor of Belfast.

What surprises me is that any one who knows Northern Ireland, and has lived there for any length of time, could be "shocked" by such a claim. There needs no ghost from the grave to tell us this.

The report does, of course, go into some detail. It tells us there are 78 gangs involved in "organized crime," with about 400 members. Over half of those gangs are linked to, or descended from, republican and loyalist underground organizations. Their activities range from making illegal fuel, such as diesel oil (a big money spinner), to smuggling cigarettes and drugs. The drugs now include heroin. They also smuggle fake CDs and videos, including porn. Their old standby, building site rackets, once one of their most lucrative sources of income, still flourishes, according to the report, especially in North Belfast, Maginness’s area.

The report briefly notes other relatively minor areas of crime, such as prostitution. But even here the paramilitaries have an influence. In South Belfast, a loyalist group takes some of the pimps ill-gotten gains in return for "protection."

Not to sound callous, but what, really, would you expect after decades of paramilitary violence, which has included bank robbery, extortion, kidnapping, intimidation and drug-running? Did any one seriously think that just because there is a political agreement between the major paramilitary organizations and their political spokesmen that they would give up their main sources of income?

The paramilitary organizations and their offshoots are now too deeply embedded in their respective working-class and rural communities to go away, even if there was a full, final political settlement tomorrow. Paramilitarism is not just a product of political circumstances. It has deeper social and economic roots. In Ulster, it goes back to the 18th century, when Catholics and Protestants formed militias during land wars. These frequently degenerated into banditry, with kidnapping and intimidation as their main activities. With the creation of the border, of course, came a whole new potential source of income.

The report is a reminder that Northern Ireland is not, and never has been, a normal society. Once, some years ago, on my return to Belfast from having lived in Italy for five years, I described Northern Ireland as "Britain’s Sicily." I wasn’t completely joking. The paramilitary networks had by then, 1992, become part of the social fabric of life the way the Mafia had in Sicily. Similar factors explained why. Italy has only been a single political entity since the 1860s. Distrust or contempt of central government remains very strong. Alternatives to state authority, which was always weak, took root, including the Mafia. Only during the Fascist era did a strong central government achieve any successes against the southern Italian and Sicilian gangs. (That was probably why the Mafia were such eager collaborators with the Allies in the 1940s.)

Alienation from the state has been a part of Ireland’s experience over the centuries, allowing armed opposition groups to flourish, most persistently in the country’s northeast corner. Initially, these groups had political and social motivations for their existence. But they needed funds, and that inevitably led to their becoming involved in ordinary criminal acts, such as bank robbery. They soon diversified. The Provisionals were the most successful. By the 1990s, they controlled taxi companies, bars, clubs, and building works. A friend who opened a bar in West Belfast in 1991 found that when something went wrong — say, in the plumbing — he was obliged to hire certain plumbers from the neighborhood, all of whom just happened to ex-prisoners belonging to a certain organization. The cost of building in Belfast rose as the paramilitaries forced companies to pay for workers who rarely, or never, showed up for the job.

The Irish People’s Liberation Organization, a splinter from the Irish National Liberation Army, under the direction of Jimmy Brown, were the first to commence with the importation of drugs on a sizable scale, mainly ecstasy tablets popular at rave parties in the late 1980s. Brown, who fancied himself as something of an intellectual, justified this by pointing to the guerrillas in Colombia, who finance their war against the state through proceeds from the trade in cocaine. The IPLO was forced to disband by the Provisional IRA in November 1992. But the drug trade goes on, mainly in the hands of elements within the Ulster Defense Association.

Now that the Provisional republican movement is going legit, with two prominent members in the power-sharing government in Belfast, it is having some trouble (like the Official IRA before them) making the transition. But interestingly enough, you can bet that its main rivals in the nationalist community, the SDLP, won’t be talking about this during the upcoming general election. But why not take advantage of what would appear to be an opponent’s political vulnerability? After all, Sinn Fein is known to be linked to the IRA, and the IRA is known to be running huge smuggling operations, as well as extracting money from other illegal sources.

When Alban Maginness, who is up against Sinn Fein for North Belfast seat in Westminster, was asked about this, following his remarks on the organized crime report, he said he had no intention of attacking Sinn Fein on the matter, despite the fact that he acknowledges the IRA’s links to such things as cigarette smuggling.

"They have successfully distinguished themselves from the paramilitary side," he said. "It doesn’t have much of an impact. The best thing I can do is ignore them, not make them a target."

This signals a drastic change in the party’s attitude to Sinn Fein’s relationship to the IRA. It wasn’t very long ago that the SDLP leader, John Hume, was quite clear about the two organizations being closely linked, and said so on the radio.

Could this sudden coyness on the subject have something to do with preserving the pan-nationalist front, perhaps?