The Belfast City Council election of 5 May 2011 was a significant moment in Northern Irish electoral history. Combined, Sinn Fein and the SDLP won 24 seats compared to a total of 21 seats held by the DUP, UUP and Progressive Unionist Party. The Alliance Party also won six seats. Among the issues on the agenda for the new council members was the flag which flies atop Belfast City Hall.
On Monday 3 December, a full 19 months after the election, the council voted in favour of a motion not to fly the flag of the United Kingdom every day. The Alliance Party, so often the voice of reason in Northern Irish politics, blocked the plan to permanently remove the flag; instead the flag will fly only on designated days.
Outside City Hall, a crowd of an estimated 1,000 had gathered ostensibly to protest the inevitable decision to remove the flag. There were reports from Alliance MP Naomi Long that a serious campaign involving the distribution of flyers had been led by mischievous elements within the DUP, but the crowd was nonetheless described as a ‘loyalist’ crowd. This ‘loyalist’ crowd broke into the grounds of City Hall and there were reports of assaults on police officers and subsequent trouble in the vicinity of the Short Strand, the nationalist enclave on the eastern bank of the Lagan close to the city centre.
The issue brought back memories of Ian Paisley’s threat to lead a crowd into nationalist west Belfast to remove an Irish tricolour which was displayed in the window of the election office of Independent Republican candidate Billy McMillen, if the police did not resolve the situation. The police duly forced their way into the Divis Street office and removed the flag, which was promptly replaced by the Irish Republican Army. This was in 1964.
Just as in 1964, the protest in Belfast was little to do with an actual flag. It seems unlikely that too many of those protesting would have noticed had the flag simply been taken down. The protest, and particularly the violence which resulted from it, was a result of an ongoing malaise within working class unionist and loyalist communities, which stretches back to the time of Paisley’s own flag protest.
The concept of loyalism is one not easily understood, even in Northern Ireland. There is an element of truth in an assertion that loyalists are more ‘hard-line’ unionists, in an equivalent relationship to that between republicans and nationalists. There is also a pejorative aspect to the use of the term ‘loyalist’ which is not necessarily applicable to the term ‘republican’, mainly due to its common association with the word ‘paramilitary’.
There is a popular adage in Northern Ireland, in reference to those paramilitary members imprisoned during the conflict, that republicans went into prison and came out with big brains; loyalists went into prison and came out with big muscles. Republicans have always been more adept at engaging with their cultural heritage, which is heavily tied up in traditional notions of Irishness and certainly more easily defined than the equivalent unionist or loyalist culture. This is particularly true of loyalists who continue to suffer from association with the paramilitary groups of the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association, or the latter’s Ulster Freedom Fighters offshoot.
The adage can be extrapolated to include the wider loyalist and republican communities. A working group involving former Progressive Unionist Party leader Dawn Purvis and Dr Peter Shirlow from Queen’s University Belfast found that a working class Protestant in Northern Ireland had only a 10% chance of attending university. Other revealing work on the topic includes that by Dr Gareth Mulvenna, also through Queen’s University. Those in nationalist communities are brought up in a culture of education and do not suffer similar issues in terms of access to education.
There are also problems of identity associated with loyalism. Take the examples of the paramilitary groups: the Ulster Defence Association grew out of local vigilante groups which were formed in response to the threat of the Provisional IRA during the early 1970s; the Ulster Volunteer Force launched its campaign in 1966, with deadly strikes against innocent Catholics which were partially borne out of fear of a hypothetical IRA campaign marking the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
There is a very significant reason that when the Provisional IRA declared its ceasefire in 1994, the Combined Loyalist Military Command followed six weeks later: without the IRA, there wasn’t anything for them to defend, militarily at least.
The problem for loyalist communities is that where the transition from IRA to Sinn Fein was a process the republican movement began in the early 1980s (some would argue sooner); there was no such long-term agenda within loyalism. It was therefore unsurprising that into the vacuum of peace-time Northern Ireland emerged figures such as Johnny Adair, Billy Wright and the Shoukri brothers.
The UDA-aligned Ulster Democratic Party was included in discussions prior to the Good Friday Agreement, but it dissolved in 2001 and Gary McMichael, its driving force, moved into community work. This was a pattern many leading UDA men followed: Jackie McDonald, Billy McQuiston and the late Sammy Duddy were all men who saw their future working within the communities which they had grown up in and defended during the years of violence. Adair and the Shoukris saw theirs selling drugs, racketeering and generally making as much money as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary.
On the other side of loyalism, the Progressive Unionist Party enjoyed more success under its charismatic leader David Ervine, arguably the most gifted loyalist politician of his generation. His sudden death from a heart attack in 2007 left a huge void within the PUP-UVF structure which his successor Dawn Purvis fought bravely to fill. Her tenure at the helm of the PUP came to an end in 2010 because of the uneasy relationship between the party and the paramilitary group, particularly following the June 2010 murder of Bobby Moffet on the Shankill Road.
In the shadows of the power struggles within the UDA and those between the UVF and PUP, the loyalist community – the community which these organisations were established to protect – find themselves lost, forgotten and without representation. True, there are two PUP members of Belfast City Council, but the party has no mandate at Westminster or Stormont. They see their elected representatives, notably first minister Peter Robinson, offering concession after concession to Sinn Fein, a party which includes several elected representatives who have served prison time for IRA offences. They see inquiries into loyalist paramilitary, British army or Royal Ulster Constabulary actions during the troubles being held and events of the past re-examined using government funds. Meanwhile, the closest Northern Ireland is to an investigation into IRA actions is the ongoing issue of the ‘Disappeared’ which is currently tied up in the Boston College oral history project.
It is a truism to argue that the key to the success of the Northern Irish peace process was the ultimate cessation of violence on the part of the Provisional IRA. With this achieved, the logic was that there was no real reason for any further political violence in the province. So, it was important for figures within the British and Irish governments to enable republican leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to facilitate a situation where the Provisional IRA could halt its campaign. One particularly clumsy episode followed the 1998 murder of Andrew Kearney, who had become involved in a fist fight with an IRA commander, when a British civil servant referred to the killing as ‘internal housekeeping’.
Such episodes fuel the perception within the loyalist community that republicans have been and are being pandered to. These perceptions indicate a far more serious implication: the Northern Irish peace process is no longer fully inclusive.
Unionist confidence in the British government took a hit from which it has never fully recovered in 1985 when the Anglo-Irish agreement established a role for the Republic of Ireland in the future of Northern Ireland. Instead of accepting what neutrals might view as a perfectly reasonable and rational decision, unionist opinion became further entrenched and the culture of mistrust began to grow.
On Friday, during her eighth visit to Belfast, and last as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton rightly condemned the violence. Her comments were given short shrift in the Belfast Telegraph by veteran commentator Eamonn McCann who dismissed her ‘hypocrisy’ over a variety of international issues such as the use of drones in Afghanistan and her stances over Egypt and the Israeli/Palestinian situation. McCann’s comments further highlight the tricky position facing politicians over the current situation in Northern Ireland which, while certainly preferable to that of decades past, is far from perfect. Clinton’s relatively benign rhetoric only echoed equally predictable condemnations from all sides in Northern Ireland, but simply saying to those responsible ‘don’t do that’ is deeply unsatisfactory and a tactic doomed to failure. Solutions must be offered.
It was naive of Belfast City Council to think that they could take down the flag without proposing an alternative solution and it is naive of anyone to assume that criticism from the outgoing United States’ secretary of state will have any real impact. Her husband may have enjoyed significant political capital with republicans during the 1990s, but Hillary Clinton certainly does not hold the same sway with the loyalist community.
It may have been about a simple flag this time around, but omitting loyalists from the incredibly delicate process of peace building in Northern Ireland is a mistake which will be too risky to make.
