IN a social media landscape where hysteria and excitability are prized above reason and calm, Moore Holmes is quite simply a phenomenon.
“I have never seen a situation so dismal,” Brendan Behan once remarked, “that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” Moore is Behan’s policeman for Loyal Ulster’s digital age. Faced with the latest insult to the union, whether in the field of politics or culture, Moore will bloviate with social media posts of exhausting longevity and toe-curling self-importance.
TLDR is social media shorthand for ‘Too long, didn’t read’, and often as I try and fail to plough through another of Moore’s tweets the length of May Street, I wonder if I can popularise TLLTWTL for ‘Too long, lost the will to live’.
I bring up Moore because I think sufficient time has passed between what may well prove to be his stand-out moment of 2025 and today to allow us to analyse it with a degree of circumspection that Moore typically omitted when he laid out the following scenario before us.
On Wednesday, August 13, a UDR veteran was innocently going about his day at the Connswater Shopping Centre in East Belfast. There appeared before him three young ‘thugs’, two of them in GAA tops, one of them in a 1916 republican top. The three took exception to the UDR man’s years of service and began to abuse him about it. So intent were they on ruining the veteran’s day that they followed him into a shop where they continued their verbal assault. Accompanying Moore’s shocking tale of one man’s struggle against the republican horde was a video clip which consisted of the former UDR shouting a series of remarks and questions in the direction of the three teens.
On this shaky edifice Moore constructed a narrative so shocking and so disturbing that Loyal Ulster rose up as one in disgust and outrage. DUP leader Gavin Robinson didn’t go so far as to travel to Connswater to get his picture taken, as he did with the Palestine graffiti on the Falls recently, but he did announce that the matter had been reported to police and he deplored the incident in terms that even Moore himself might have considered a tad on the hyperbolic side. “Nobody should face harassment or threats simply out shopping in their own community,” said the East Belfast MP, “much less those who have stood in defence of the freedoms that allow our society to go about our daily lives without the threat of terrorism that was very much more present in years gone by.”
Heading towards three weeks later and the story is, in Monty Python terms, no more. It has ceased to be. It’s pushin’ up daisies. It has shuffled off its mortal coil and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. It is an ex-story.
No arrests have been made. No culprits have been paraded before the cameras in the perp-walk of shame. In fact, no-one has been so much as got out of bed.
In a statement released some days later (via Moore Holmes, naturally), the UDR veteran said he wouldn’t be reporting the matter to the police because the process would be too upsetting for him. If Private X and Moore hoped that that would suffice as a reason for the trio’s prima facie crimes to be forgotten about, they had forgotten that not all of us take our legal advice from TV cops shows. For the simple fact is that there is zero requirement for a victim to “press charges”; there is zero requirement for a victim to get involved in a case in any way, shape or form. In fact, nowhere is it stated in the law of the UK that the co-operation of a victim is to be taken into consideration when the police are deciding whether or not to pursue an arrest. Throw in the aforementioned reporting of the incident to the Trevors by the DUP and Private X’s reluctance becomes, and let’s go Latin here, nec hic, nec illic – neither here nor there.
Now that the story has, like the Python parrot, expired and gone to meet its maker, let’s have a look at what we’re left with outside of Moore’s quivering indignation. Let’s have a look at what we’re left with after it has become clear that Constable Trevor has decided that this is not, after all, the crime of the century
There’s someone we don’t see (either Private X or an associate) filming the car park scene. The audio on the camera side is fine, the audio of the three GAA youths some 20 or 30 metres away veers from indistinguishable to unclear. Private X’s tone is indignant and excited, which is to be expected if Moore’s version of events is correct; but the three young men are clearly confused and uncertain, totally bereft of the aggression that we’re told sparked the encounter. Does their body language suggest a threat? Was their demeanour such that the Connswater area needed to go to DefCon 1? When I say not on your Nellie, you may well disagree, and you have every right to. But if you do disagree, Squinter can say with a high degree of confidence that you have never actually been in a car park when things were about to kick off. Squinter has. On more occasions than he cares to recall.
Which brings us to the Strange Case of the Lower Leg Tattoo, which is not a lesser-known Sherlock Holmes adventure, but rather the beating heart of this distinctly odd plotline. It seems the three GAA chaps were able to identify Private X as a veteran of His Majesty’s Forces by the UDR tattoo on his leg, and their subsequent verbal and physical threats flowed from their knowledge of British military symbols. Which, let’s face it, is impressive.
Squinter’s looking at the UDR badge as he writes and it’s a harp, one side of which is a winged female figure with her diddies hanging out, and on top of which is a crown. Top marks to three GAA kids for working that out.
MILITARY TATTOO: The UDR badge
Ah, comes the reply, but the tattoo might have had some accompanying text. ‘I love the UDR’, perhaps. ‘God bless the UDR’, maybe. Or ‘Mum, Dad, UDR’. But that again presupposes a rather unlikely level of British military knowledge on the part of three teenagers in GAA tops. If I did a vox pop of teens at a training session at St John’s, for instance, how many of them would know what the UDR was or what the letters stood for? I’m thinking of a number that’s lower than one and higher than minus one.
And if we throw in the indisputable fact that three GAA tops on the Newtownards Road are rather more obvious to a unionist of a certain age than a UDR tattoo on an oul’ lad’s leg is to three kids born 35 years after the regiment was kicked to the kerb, another possible reason for confrontation begins to thrust itself forward.
Which brings us finally and perhaps most importantly to the technological aspect of this perplexing affair. The clip that did the rounds is but one digital view of this unfortunate episode. It has completely disappeared from the internet, and whether that means it has been put in a holding cell by the social media police or whether m’learned friends have become involved, Squinter can’t say. But Constable Trevor will have access to it. And he will have had the opportunity to avail himself of a shedload of CCTV footage. The lampposts in every shopping centre in Ireland bristle with security cameras and I assume Connswater is no different. All shops have in-store cameras and I assume Connswater shops do not deviate from that standard industry practice. Therefore, there will in all likelihood be footage indicating who approached whom. There will be footage of the Terrible Trio stalking their victim from the car park into the shop. if that is indeed what happened. There will be multiple filmic depictions of passivity and activity from which police can reasonably infer a likely set of events.
It may be that Private X was indeed a victim of sectarian thuggery and that his reticence in pursuing the guilty is indeed dictated by his desire for a quiet life. Or it may be that things weren’t as cut and dried as Moore’s impassioned narration would have us believe, in which case the state’s failure to produce handcuffs might make more sense.
And sense – common or otherwise – is the one thing that this sorry tale is desperately in need of.
