When you tell your story, be careful who hears
The violence of the past week has highlighted an uncomfortable truth at the heart of Northern Irish politics – that very often, violence pays.
Few places in the Western world have as long and storied a history of street violence interacting with institutional politics as Northern Ireland does. Its past is littered with periods when violence, or the threat of violence, was used by various actors to advance their cause. In both communities, tales of Easter Risings and Home Rule Bills are passed down from generation to generation as the founding fables of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland respectively. From more recent history, Sinn Fein and the broader Republican movement have engaged in promoting a narrative that portrays every gain made by the nationalist community since 1969 as the result of Provisional IRA violence. This has included claiming responsibility for the various pieces of civil rights legislation passed in the 1968-72 period, despite the fact that much of this legislation was enacted before the PIRA was even active.
Although this version of history told by Sinn Fein was largely intended for a nationalist audience, the problem with stories is that sometimes you do not get to choose who listens. The narrative that Republican violence was rewarded has also been heard by a loyalist community that already had its own history of political violence and only served to strengthen the perception that violence can pay. Not only is this perception historical, that violence paid, but events since the start of the Peace Process have meant that it remains firmly in the present tense. In the late 1990s, both communities at times engaged in what can only be described as an arms race over the parading issue, with each side attempting to outdo the other in who could threaten the most violence and often that being a key consideration in which way decisions went. Later, the area of Glenbryn in North Belfast underwent extensive redevelopment in as a “reward” for local loyalists ending their protest against Catholic schoolgirls. Tens of millions of taxpayer funds have been showered on various “community” groups and leaders in an attempt to prevent former paramilitaries from returning to violence. Meanwhile, many loyalists saw a police decision to reroute a parade away from the nationalist Ardoyne area in 2013 as a response to threats of dissident Republican disorder.
It should be noted that although, as the above examples show, violence can often be seen to succeed in Northern Ireland, there have been instances where this has not been the case. The Flag Protests of 2012-13 saw no tangible gains for loyalists despite weeks of unrest, and dissident Republicans have generally struggled to advance their cause, despite ongoing violence since 1998. Nevertheless, the perception, with some justification remains – that if you are prepared to be violent in Northern Ireland, then that can win attention and concessions.
And so, with this backdrop we arrive at 2021. There is no single cause of the latest round of violence (for a more detailed exploration of the causes see this excellent article by Jenny McCartney), but tensions have been simmering in loyalist communities since the Northern Ireland Protocol and associated Irish Sea Border came into force in January of this year. A solution, let’s not forget, that was in part a response to the fear that a land border could cause Republican violence. Initially, loyalist anger was largely channelled into political means. A DUP petition calling for the triggering of Article 16 garnered over 140,000 signatures, while there was hope that the EU’s clumsy handling of the vaccine issue may create the political space required for greater easements to the protocol. However, as the weeks passed, talks between the UK and EU continued with no clear resolution, and with the prospect of further checks coming into effect in the coming months – loyalist anger continued to simmer beneath the surface. Add to that the match that was the PSNI decision not to prosecute any Sinn Fein member over the alleged breaching of Covid-19 regulations at a funeral last summer, only further heightening tensions and being viewed by many as another example of when threats of violence can result in preferential treatment. Take all this together and it is not hard to see why some loyalists have taken to the streets, once again viewing violence rather than politics as the best way to make their voices heard.
Once a spiral of violence begins in Northern Ireland, it is often difficult to stop. This is particularly true on the loyalist side, where politicians from the two main Unionist Parties, the DUP and UUP, have a notoriously poor level of “street influence” in loyalist areas. Those parties have historically been much more attuned to those in provincial towns and the rural social conservative demographic of unionism (where they draw much of their membership from) than the working-class loyalist districts of inner-city Belfast. This is in contrast to Sinn Fein, whose historic “pedigree” in street violence has meant their leaders have tended to have much more influence in these situations. However, it should be noted that the presence of several Sinn Fein politicians was still not enough to prevent nationalists clashing with police in West Belfast on Thursday. This has led to a concern on both sides that a new younger generation is growing up which the older Troubles generation of politicians have less influence over and who therefore may be harder to keep in check (for more on this, see IRA Tiktok).
It remains to be seen whether the recent loyalist violence will result in any substantive changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol. My sense is that it will not, that there are flexibilities to be made to the Protocol that have broad cross-party political support and if they are made, would likely have been made anyway regardless of events over the past week. However, I fear that rather than challenge the view that violence pays, the latest rioting will only further strengthen it. Before last week, loyalist grievances over the protocol had a limited audience and limited attention outside of NI. However, there is little doubt that the violence has succeeded in at least bringing greater attention to those grievances: as a tweet from the Boris Johnson, endless articles in London newspapers and even a statement from the White House have shown. Whether any further action will be taken remains to be seen, but it is likely that any future relaxation to the protocol will be claimed by loyalism (and promoted by the DUP) as a victory for the unionist cause. Even if these easements have nothing to do with recent violence, that will not stop them being perceived as so by some loyalists, only further ingraining the view that violence can be rewarded.
On what is a gloomy outlook, there are some bright spots. Each cycle of loyalist violence since the 1990s has attracted less and less support both in terms of numbers participating and from broader unionism. On some occasions, there were 100,000 people protesting at Drumcree, even the flag protests saw disruption in most Northern Irish towns, but the recent violence appears to have largely been contained both in geography and numbers. This of course could be a result of the pandemic, but there does appear to be a trend that the number of those willing to engage in such street protests is falling over time.
Nevertheless, as long as the perception remains in Northern Irish society that violence can be used to get your way, it will be difficult for it to move to a more stable and prosperous politics. As long as the violence button can be pressed, or threatened, the institutions set up in 1998 will remain inherently unstable, to the detriment of Northern Ireland and all its people (you don’t need a PhD in Economics to know that people tend to be reluctant to set up businesses or invest in areas where criminality is allowed to operate largely untouched). The only way to counter it will ultimately be for all those in power to show that violence and criminality are never rewarded, should never be rewarded and should never have been rewarded, and that democratic politics, as frustrating and slow as it can be, is the only way to successfully bring about change.