IF the people of the Lower Newtownards Road are content for a memorial parade for a UVF sectarian killer to take over the area for a day then there’s no-one with a scintilla of good faith who could possibly object.
We may not like it, but demanding that the police stop it, or moralising about the people behind it, is about as much use as shaking a fist at clouds. The memorials are going to take place and people are going to turn out; were the the requisite degree of consistency and common sense to be seen, the events would take place and then we’d all go about our business.
But once again we’re treated to another display of jaw-dropping hypocrisy from unionist representatives. Some 1,500 men in white shirts and black ties lined the road on Saturday, reportedly to support the leadership of one thug and to send a message to another thug that it’s time to get out. Whatever the reason for the display, the utter lack of concern or condemnation from unionist reps, locally or wider afield, copperfastens the perception that unionists have no problem generally with paramilitarism or illegal displays of power and intimidation; they only have a problem with those displays which take place within other communities.
The obvious parallel was the 2020 funeral of leading republican Bobby Storey, where a similarly sizeable group of men (and women in that case) turned out to pay their respects for a man held in huge esteem by his friends, family and colleagues. The hysterical response to that event – complicated by taking place in the middle of the Covid pandemic – has become something of a joke among observers of the political scene thanks to the amount of media coverage that it received over the course of not days, weeks or months, but years.
In any analysis of the reason behind the continued dominance of the UVF and UDA within working class loyalist communities, the greed and brutality of the thugs continuing to rule districts by the gun will of course loom largest. But the failure of unionism to face down the paramilitaries, the refusal of senior figures to take a stand against them in the way that Martin McGuinness did with dissident micro-groups, can be seen as a crucial aspect of the failure to release the long-suffering people of those areas from the grip of fear.
Those unionists who look the other way when the hard men take centre-stage encounter few consequences. The former nursing chief Pat Cullen has come under pressure to answer for past IRA actions after she decided to run for Sinn Féin in Fermanagh-South Tyrone; but you’re advised not to hold your breath waiting for those journalists on the trail of Ms Cullen to put unionism’s feet to the fire over its absolute failure to oppose the centrality of loyalist killer gangs in the daily life of communities right across the North.
One consequence for them, though, is the fact that their bare-faced hypocrisy makes them little more than figures of fun when they rant about others.
