THE shooting of Sean O’Reilly as he sat in his taxi in Poleglass on Sunday morning is a warning to us all not to take for granted the deepening insignificance of anti-peace process dissident groups across this city and beyond. The confused and confusing collection of groups, sub-groups and splinter groups never commanded a scintilla of the support they needed to legitimise their existence, never mind their actions, and in recent years these already peripheral organisations have been slowly but surely fading ever further from the public consciousness.
But the shooting of Mr O’Reilly at the weekend is an unfortunate reminder that these groups continue to act out their self-centred dramas and our sincere hope is first that whoever carried out this cowardly act will be swiftly brought to book and, secondly, that those involved are too few, too gormless and too ill-equipped to effect a deepening and widening of the fall-outs that led to this brutal attack.
Two days after the shooting, in a more comical but equally telling display of the place that dissidents occupy in this city, a number of masked men took over a community policing event in the Girdwood Community Hub in North Belfast and read out a statement rejecting the PSNI.
The state of policing here at the moment is a bad joke. Poor decision follows poor decision, operational incompetence seems to be the norm rather than the exception and the protection of the RUC and the blocking of attempts to get to the truth about historic crimes perpetrated by the state remains an expensive and debilitating priority for the PSNI. So our motivation is not defence of currently shambolic policing structures when we say that the last thing we need is anonymous individuals telling committed community activists what they should do and who they should engage with in their work of making life better for us all.
It was perhaps inevitable that dissidents would zero in on widespread disillusion with the PSNI to garner a credibility that they totally lack. But if in selecting those who serve and protect us it comes to a choice between hard-working members of this community working strategically with the PSNI and shadowy figures representing no-one but themselves, then that is no choice at all. We stand four-square with those who organised the Girdwood event and we unequivocally reject those who disrupted it – although the wincingly amateur nature of the mobile phone footage that has emerged will do more to damage the cause of those masked dissidents than any words of ours ever could.
We’re under no illusion about how far community disapproval can go in persuading these groups to fold up their tents and leave. They have proved over the years they are answerable to no-one but themselves and ultimately they will be defeated by their own irrelevance. Their intrusions on our daily lives remain utterly unwanted, but they are becoming thankfully ever less common.
