YOU may have noted as I did that DUP Education Minister Paul Givan’s meeting with the Loyalist Communities Council – the umbrella group for the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando – didn’t have a photo opp afterwards.
In sitting down with representatives of the still-active loyalist paramilitary groups Minister Givan suggested that he’s not entirely on board with his leader Gavin Robinson’s weekend words at the DUP conference when he said that it’s time for the party to reflect and embark on a new approach to politics. Because I’d have thought that a new approach might at the very least have involved no longer sitting down with still-active criminals who have been promising not to be still-active criminals since the year Paul Givan made the switch from primary to secondary school. But no. As far as the Department of Education goes, the lads from the Con Club back room still hold their stakes.
Shunning an official photograph suggests, however, that the Minister is determined to embark on a new approach as far as PR is concerned. His former leader, Baroness Foster of Tittlejot, famously got her picture taken shoulder to shoulder with the UDA's spokesman on cosmetic dentistry and North Down’s premier bonfire engineer Dee Stitt – and a meme was born. Mr Givan was savvy enough to understand that while talking to paramilitary hardmen about schools is one thing, smiling like a loon beside them while the thousand per cent UDA and UVF Christmas loans are being negotiated across working class areas of Loyal Ulster is another.
Number one on the list of paramilitary priorities at the meeting was the new Irish language school in East Belfast. The lads don’t want it, of course, and they said as much to the Minister; but here’s what’s left hanging; here’s what nobody wants to mention…
Say a union meets a minister and says they don’t want something, what are they going to do if they don’t get it?
Well, they’re going to stage a picket or go on strike. Or on a go-slow. Or a work-to-rule. In other words, they’re going to do uniony things.
If a parents’ group meets a minister and says they’re unhappy about something, what are they going to do if they remain unhappy?
They’re going to ring the local paper and stand at the school gates with placards; they might even march to the relevant department HQ.
If an environmental group meets a minister and ask him to go easy on the planet, what will they do if he doesn’t?
They’ll likely put on white masks and carry a coffin up the Stormont steps or write a stern letter to the Guardian.
But if this Irish language school doesn’t get scrapped, what are the UVF, the UDA and the Red Hand Commando going to do about it?
These guys aren’t noted for imaginative displays of political street theatre. If you Google them you won’t see their names in stories about local community activism, you’ll see their names in court reports and in double-page spreads in the Sunday tabloids. The UVF and the UDA don’t get their way in the communities they rule by the force of their argument or the charisma of their senior people. They get their way simply and entirely because they have guns. When they say they don’t want an Irish school anywhere near them, people’s ears prick up because the same people used to shoot people dead in their beds for being Irish.
STAKEHOLDERS: A UVF mural in the Woodvale district
The simple truth is that every single word that loyalist paramilitaries utter in their roles as loyalist paramilitaries is a threat. If a UDA brigadier passes while you're standing at the door and says how much he likes your roses you don't say thanks – you dig up your rose bush and give it to him.
Because that’s who they are: People who get what they want through violence. They sell people drugs, they give them protection and they loan them money and the contract simply reads: “Pay up or get killed or battered.”
Because that’s what they are: People who suck the life out of others. They are a criminal cabal getting rich on the misery of the people they claim to serve and protect.
The difference is that in Dublin politicians don’t meet the Kinahans or the Hutches to talk policy. In Dublin they pour huge resources into locking the Kinahans and the Hutches up. Up here, the PSNI refers frightened and vulnerable migrants to the UVF and UDA in the hope that Pliers and Stewarty will step away from the class A long enough to offer them a little friendly advice on how to keep their windows intact.
It's not odd, or strange, as has been repeatedly suggested in recent days. It shouldn’t provoke yeah-but-no-but radio phone-ins. It shouldn’t inspire 750-word columns on the complexity of transitioning from columnists whose unshakable opposition to the IRA morphs into philosophical pencil-sucking when it comes to loyalist paramilitaries.
Nuts is what it is. Stark-raving insanity.
The only question that needed to be asked about that meeting was whether the senior UVF and UDA members who attended were arrested going into or coming out of it.
