SQUINTER’S seen a lot in his three-plus decades in conflict journalism. With a nod to his Andytown News debut as a movie reviewer, he has to admit he hasn’t seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. But he’s seen some pretty out-there things.
Most of the more outré experiences came pre-ceasefire when everybody had gone a bit crazy through the noise of the bombs and the smell of the cordite. But it must be said that the more recent emergence of UDA and UVF Human Resources departments is as weird and wonderful as anything Squinter’s come across in all his days in the inky trade.
You’ll be familiar with the Spider-Man meme in which two of the red and black superheroes are pointing their wrist-webshooters at each other in a threatening manner. It pops up regularly in online forums to suggest a certain… circularity. A DUP elected rep accusing somebody of not liking Ulster-Scots, for instance, might find himself in receipt of the meme given that party’s fraught relationship with the Irish language community. So might a Shinner telling us all to be nice to each other after they threw our Trans friends and neighbours under a bus, reversed over them and fined them for not having a ticket.
The overwhelmingly unionist media in this little corner of Paradise is one big Spider-Man meme these days when it comes to the pimps, killers, drug barons, loan sharks and assorted reprobates who people the ranks of the two main groups tasked with saving Ulster. Because where once their latest contributions to the gaiety of the nation were commented on by disgusted councillors, appalled MLAs and incandescent MPs, now outrageous behaviour by UDA men are subjected to the scrutiny of the UDA; the crimes of UVF men are presented to the UVF for consideration.
How does that play out on a daily and weekly basis? Well, say for instance UDA foot soldier Pliers has been selling crack cocaine in the playground of an orphanage for blind kids in East Belfast. And further say for instance that his mate Killer is threatening a one-legged ex-services pensioner over a payday loan debt that went from £50 to £750 in two days. Once upon a time such behaviour would have incurred the wrath of the reporting journalist’s most reliable speed-dial, permafurious political contact. Now it gets referred upstairs to the UDA’s internal affairs division.
“But the days of Pliers flogging his deadly wares to children in dark glasses and white sticks are about to come to an end as UDA sources confirmed to us that a move against the out-of-control death-dealer is planned by his disgusted comrades within days.”
As for Killer: “It’s our understanding that he has been summoned to a meeting of some of the UDA’s most senior figures who will tell him in no uncertain terms to reduce his loan interest rate from stratospheric to outrageous.”
Why might this be?, we ask ourselves. How come all of a sudden
i) the UDA has a department responsible for maintaining the organisation’s good name, and
ii) how come the depredations of some of Ulster’s most loyal but unstable sons are a matter for internal review instead of political disgust?
Same with the UVF. If you’ve a heavily-bejewelled trigger man extorting every shop within a mile of your distinctive Housing Executive pad with the Greco-Roman pillars and keeping the money for yourself, that’s going to be considered by a DEI-compliant HR panel in the UVF boardroom. If there’s a former loyalist prisoner with half a dozen trafficked adolescent females dispensing drinks and favours in his garden shed shebeen, he’s going to have to answer for his behaviour at the next meeting of the UVF’s new Women and Girls Protection Task Force.
So how come the stout yeomen patrolling Loyal Ulster’s ramparts are suddenly being divided into miscreants and moderators? Hard to say, really, but there can be little doubt that those nameless HR panelists now being held up as community paragons are going to be happy with their new-found status; and those groups which hitherto have been seen as carbuncles on the backside of communities will be delighted to have been invested with the wisdom of Solomon.
And a happy or even delighted paramilitary is a lot less bother than a furious one.
Why Tiny Tim gets a C-minus in geography
THE TUV says there shouldn’t be Irish language signage on the new Grand Central Station because the station is in “a loyalist heartland”.
Jim Allister’s Stormont stand-in, Timothy Gaston, was speaking after Sinn Féin Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins announced – to precisely no-one’s surprise – that Irish language signage would be going up later this year. This after Grand Central opened last September with English-only signage, leading to a protest by the Irish language lobby group An Dream Dearg.
Tim’s from North Antrim and it’s perhaps not surprising that he knows more about the geography of Belfast than he does about the lyric poetry of Pádraig Mac Piaras. But there exists at this juncture in our great planet story a thing called the internet, and on the internet is a thing called Google, and a popular feature of the thing called Google is Google Maps.
Tim’s clearly never been to Grand Central and he is presumably unfamiliar with the wonders of the internet because only someone gloriously unacquainted with the lay-out of Belfast could say with a straight face that Grand Central Station is in a loyalist heartland.
He’s clearly confused by the fact that the Boyne Bridge has been in the news recently over a disastrously belated attempt by unionist politicians and community representatives to save the structure from demolition, citing it as a key part of the city’s loyalist cultural history. The bridge leads to Sandy Row, which is indeed – altogether now! – a loyalist heartland.
ALL CHANGE: Information will soon be available in Irish at Grand Central Station
But a cursory bird’s eye view of the lay of the land reveals that the station lies in a kind of orange/green no-man’s-land, equidistant from Sandy Row and nationalist homes on the Grosvenor Road.
And guess what. The house Squinter was born in – an entirely Catholic street slap-bang at the back door of Roden Street barracks – was situated a 90-second walk from Translink’s sprawling £350 million bus and train hub.
Shaftesbury Square, whose shabby, faded grandeur is synonymous with the current state of the city, is a place from where you could throw a stone to the loyalist heartland© of Sandy Row – indeed if you stand at the west side of the square you could probably reach it with a breeze block. But would any loyal son of Ulster – apart from Tim – describe Shaftesbury Square as a loyalist heartland? If they would Squinter’s never heard them do it.
It’s not the first time that geography has been tweaked in an attempt to Keep Our Signs English. In June 2023 the DUP opposed an Irish sign on Olympia Leisure Centre. Edwin Poots – a pig farmer from Hillsborough who was coopted into South Belfast in 2022 after the death of Christopher Stalford – said the plan was causing “anger and angst” among residents (the residents being the car and kitchen showrooms of Boucher Road). And Tim’s contention that the island’s largest transport facility is a loyalist heartland© in no way detracts from the fact that as far as the TUV and the loyal orders are concerned, the Ardoyne shops are not a nationalist heartland but a public thoroughfare.
