ANALYSIS:With some 1,000 dead, loyalist paramilitaries are laying down their arms, writes GERRY MORIARTY, Northern Editor
THE ULSTER Volunteer Force (UVF), its smaller sister organisation, the Red Hand Commando, and the UDA between them killed about 1,000 people.
News that they have begun decommissioning may be cold comfort for the bereaved and the thousands injured and maimed by the groups.
Many of those victims will be understandably sceptical – and some scepticism is always useful when considering the actions of paramilitaries – but nonetheless more guns and bombs out of commission can’t be discounted.
It can be argued that the troubles started with the UVF although 1969 more generally is viewed as their beginning. In the book Lost Lives, the first murder of the modern conflict is attributed to the organisation when it shot west Belfast Catholic John Scullion in May 1966. He died the following month.
Earlier in May 1966, Gusty Spence’s UVF, in attempting to set fire to a Catholic-owned bar and off-licence on the Shankill Road, accidentally fire-bombed the home of 77-year-old Protestant Matilda Gould who also died in June from her injuries. Also in June that year the UVF murdered Catholic barman Peter Ward, a killing for which Spence was sentenced to 20 years.
Eight years later, the UVF was responsible for the Dublin-Monaghan bombings when 33 died. Flash forward to yesterday 15 years ago, when the UVF murdered six men at the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, Co Down, as they were watching Ireland defeat Italy in the World Cup in the United States.
Yet four months later in October 1994, after all that death and horror, the UVF, UDA and Red Hand Commando could announce their ceasefire, and Gusty Spence could read a statement of “abject and true remorse” to the “loved ones of all innocent victims” of the Troubles on behalf of the loyalist groups. People can change.
So, this decommissioning is important in that it marks the passing of another important milestone as Northern Ireland stumbles its way towards becoming a peaceful and relatively normal society. We must, of course, wait for more detail from the paramilitaries and Gen John de Chastelain, head of the hitherto underworked International Independent Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), about how much was actually decommissioned. Certainly, with regard to the UVF, the word is that the amount was “significant and substantial”.
This decommissioning is noteworthy for the additional reason that there were concerns that the loyalist paramilitaries might use the recent dissident republican murders of two British soldiers and a police officer as an excuse not to disarm.
It’s a helpful antidote too to the dreadful business of more than 100 Romanians being forced from their houses by loyalist racists.
Gen de Chastelain wasn’t around to confirm the decommissioning reports and he wasn’t saying anything either. It was left to the Northern Secretary Shaun Woodward to state that the guns are being rendered useless, although virtually every line that he uttered at his press conference contained the preface, “if these reports are correct . . . ” His qualified remarks were based on the IICD being an independent body and that he was not in a position to speak on its behalf. It was all rather odd but that’s paramilitary protocol for you.
This decommissioning validates the decision of unionist leaders such as Peter Robinson to engage directly with the paramilitaries to persuade them to move on weapons. It is particularly good news for Mr Woodward who had taken something of a risk, and annoyed some politicians, in allowing the paramilitaries up to August to make a move on arms.
If there were no disarmament by August, he warned he would end the legal provision which allowed paramilitaries to move arms for decommissioning without fear of prosecution. That legislation is now likely to run until February next year when all organisations will be expected to have fully decommissioned.