Since I broke the story about the UVF Brigade Staff on the Shankill standing down its East Belfast area leadership, it has become clear that the group has not produced a more comprehensive plan for what comes next.
My sources in Belfast tell me that the statement was “short and sweet.” It did not mention any names – despite the BBC and Belfast Telegraph claiming it did, with the latter running the headline ‘Eight members of East Belfast UVF removed in ‘clean up'”. In fact, my trusted sources who first broke the news to me on Sunday a short time after the UVF statement was read out have urged me to clarify this point for it dilutes the significance of the statement.
My sources say that the statement “came as a shock” because the rank and file never expected the UVF’s overall leadership to take such drastic action against its East Belfast unit.
“That is why there was such a roar of approval that rang out when the statement was read out,” they claim.
Importantly, it now seems that those individuals who read out the statement were the “key people” in each area (meaning local leaders), flanked, my sources say, by individuals dressed in paramilitary attire. It has since been alleged that these paramilitaries were armed. Whether they were armed is, perhaps, not as important as the theatrics of the moment. Anyone who has seen armed and masked men read out prepared statements at gable ends – which happened a lot back in the day – will know that it carries significance beyond the act itself. In fact, militant groups often have more than one audience in mind when engaging in propaganda-related activities.
For an organization like the UVF, the symbolism of the act also reflects how the group thinks of itself as well as how it is organized. It also echoes the intent of the group’s command structure.
“Nothing is done unintentionally,” one former member of the UVF told me. “Anyone can read out a statement on a stage in a club; what matters is that they were flanked as they did it, which suggests intent and capability.”
In an interview I did with a local Northern Ireland news agency in the wake of the revelation I was asked why this statement has come now.
It might be worth elucidating the answers I gave in more detail here:
First, that the UVF has been kicking the can up and down the street on the issue of its “rogue” East Belfast Battalion for years. The group first became an irritant in the summer of 2011 when they orchestrated public disorder, which suggested the UVF as a group was becoming Balkanized. They stepped up their campaign of terror 18 months later when the flag protests saw loyalists take to the streets. Fast forward to 27 January 2019 when members of the East Belfast UVF murdered respected loyalist Ian Ogle to death in Cluan Place just off the Newtownards Road. Mr Ogle had been stabbed in the back 11 times and his skull was fractured as five men set upon him. The UVF Brigade Staff came under intense pressure to act, especially in the wake of their support for the LCC statement on criminality on 9 April 2018.
Second, the UVF’s associates in community-based groups – what are known as ‘delivery partners’ in bureaucratic peace process speak – have come under increased scrutiny from funders in recent weeks since it transpired that paramilitaries remained a clear and present danger. Advocates of conflict transformation within the UVF and their community associates believe that the process of group transition has yet to be completed and the standing down of the group’s East Belfast battalion helps them readjust their course of action in line with the LCC statement issued in 2018.
Third, the UVF has come under considerable pressure from within its support base. Family members of UVF volunteers have questioned the involvement of the group in illicit activities, particularly the drug trade that is destroying the lives of so many people in deprived and marginalized areas across Northern Ireland. It reached a tipping point as the community itself – for so long providing a base from which the UVF to operate – has questioned its role and purpose.
Although the news of the UVF statement should be welcomed as a positive step, there is more the UVF needs to do to run itself out of business and leave the stage.
For now though the group seems stuck, for one reason or another, in terms of completing what restraining voices in working class communities desperately need to see: an end to paramilitarism and the return of peace and prosperity to the most deprived and marginalized parts of the province.