The End of Loyalist Paramilitary ‘Group Transition’?

It has become clear in recent days that the UVF Brigade Staff on the Shankill has seen its stock rise in the eyes of its grassroots supporters due to its shock statement a week ago, which saw them announcement the standing down its East Belfast leadership.

I argued in an earlier blog post that there may have been three reasons why the UVF moved against its East Belfast unit now:

First, that moving against a rogue crew was long overdue, though doing it now would provide the central leadership with an opportunity to fall more meaningfully behind its support for the LCC statement of intent to purge criminals from their ranks in 2018.

Second, that the UVF’s associates in community-based groups were coming under pressure from statutory bodies and funders who wanted them to accelerate their transition beyond paramilitaries.

Finally, that the UVF could no longer sit on the fence on the issue of criminality – and particularly drug dealing – that was harming the community senior leaders had long pledged to defend.

It has since transpired that the latter rationale may underpin the UVF’s decision-making. To put it simply, if they believed what they have consistently said over the years – that you “cannot be a loyalist and a criminal” – then they really needed to ‘put their money where their mouth is’.

One loyalist source in Belfast told me that the UVF’s Brigade Staff has managed to finally meet the appetite of grassroots loyalists who bought into this narrative and never took advantage of the the financial aggrandizement drug dealing offered. It seems that the centre of gravity within the UVF grassroots has finally shifted behind the leadership who have reportedly been fervent in their intent to rid their organization of the scourge of drugs, once and for all.

As I have argued in an earlier blog, this is to be welcomed. It is good news for those living in marginalized and deprived areas across Northern Ireland. They are the people who have been calling for the UVF to clean up its act and to deal with the East Belfast UVF once and for all.

However, while it provides a positive vision for the future, it would appear that it has injected a new raison d’être into the UVF.

As I have suggested elsewhere the UVF began as a conspiracy against the former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Captain Terence O’Neill, in the 1960s, the group underwent a strategic reorientation upon the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969 when it took up the mantle of defending their community from external attack. By 1994 the UVF Brigade Staff were persuaded of the need to call a ceasefire because, they argued, it reflected the will of their grassroots supporters in the wake of the IRA’s own ceasefire. The same sentiment was expressed in 2007 when the UVF announced that it had put weapons “beyond reach” and formally ended their armed campaign in 2009, thereafter engaging in a process of decommissioning. Since then the UVF has remained in place with serious efforts aimed at transforming loyalist communities under the banner of the Action for Community Transformation (ACT), which has led efforts at what the Independent Reporting Commission calls “group transition”.

The process of group transition has stalled for a variety of reasons, not least because of the political instability caused by Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol. The UVF’s paramilitary structures did not wither on the vine, as expected.

Crucially, rather than this latest development completing the process of group transition, it now appears that it may even reverse it and give the UVF a renewed energy to return to its position of defender of their communities, not against militant republicans or even other loyalists but against transnational organized crime gangs in their midst. It has been alleged by some journalists that the East Belfast UVF were operating as part of the Dublin-based Kinahan Cartel, one of the biggest narco gangs in the world. As a ‘shop front’ for narco criminals, the East Belfast crew were found by the UVF’s powerful Provost Marshall team (which is the internal disciplinary mechanism with representation on the Brigade Staff) to have lined their own pockets and engaged in intimidation, paramilitary style attacks, extortion and even murder.

It seems clear from what my loyalist sources in Belfast have told me that the standing down of the East Belfast leadership is being greeted on the ground as, perhaps, the biggest development to have taken place within paramilitary loyalism for over a decade.

Conversely, while I initially welcomed it as a strategic decision of significance, it has been a double-edged sword in that it is likely to reverse the UVF’s intent to move towards group transition.

One source tells me that loyalist representatives had recently met with government officials to tell them in no uncertain terms that cleaning up loyalism and ridding it of criminality meant a trade-off. That they would comply with internal and external pressures to stop drug dealing and other illicit activities but that their structures would remain as a protective measure against heavily armed transnational organized crime gangs. It has long been argued that these narco gangs are poised to fill the void to meet the increasing demand for illicit drugs in the most deprived and marginalized areas of Northern Ireland when paramilitaries leave the stage. Loyalist sources in Belfast tell me this decision was arrived at reluctantly due to “the PSNI’s inability to tackle drug crime.”

It now seems likely that paramilitary structures will remain in place for the foreseeable future – rather than what some have argued to the contrary – as a deterrent to narco gangs.

As with many of the decisions taken by loyalist paramilitaries in the past, only time will tell if this rejuvenated strategy will play out in the way those who have formulated it – and are now in the process of implementing it – expect it to.