Sunday Times
September 18, 2005
As west Belfast picks up the pieces, Ulster Protestants are divided on who to blame for the riots, write Liam Clarke and Jason Johnston
In Church of Ireland circles, Rev Alan McCann is known as a prominent Orangeman and an opponent of the Good Friday agreement. But last Sunday he had a startling message for his congregation at Holy Trinity Church near Carrickfergus.
“I told them that I was ashamed. I had spent a lot of time considering whether I should remain in the Orange Order. What happened on Saturday was scandalous,” he said.
As the week unfolded, McCann became even more upset and disillusioned as the full story of loyalist violence emerged and the Orange Order’s sympathetic reaction to it. By Tuesday, 115 shots had been fired at the police by loyalists, and 116 vehicles hi-jacked. Television footage showed high-velocity bullets embedded in the sides of PSNI Land Rovers, or smashing their windows, clearly intended to kill the occupants.
Dawson Bailie, the order’s Belfast County grand master, who had called for crowds on the streets, had been on television refusing to condemn anything. Instead he blamed the police and said he would act in exactly the same way if the situation arose again.
McCann is the sort of man the Orange Order can ill- afford to lose. He comes from a police family and traces his Orange roots back at least four generations. When he joined the order at the age of 17, most of the men in the lodge were relatives. Since his sermon he has found himself acting as lightning rod for widespread discontent with the direction Orangeism has taken. “I have been contacted by senior officers from other counties saying it needed to be said.”
A few of the callers have gone public, including Rev Brian Kennaway, the former chairman of the order’s education committee, and William Wray, the grand treasurer for Londonderry. Others are keeping their heads down, uncertain whether to seek internal reform, vote with their feet or wait for it all to blow over.
The problem is that many sceptical Orangemen share the alienation of grassroots Protestants from the peace process, and this mutes their condemnation. As McCann sees it: “There has been no peace dividend for the Protestant people. I understand the frustration, but I think that the Orange Order has been used behind the scenes. It was disappointing to see Orangemen participating in that violence.”
THERE is no doubt that the violence was planned. A buzz was going round loyalist areas all last week. One man from North Belfast recalled: “On the bus into town on Friday, kids were saying that there were going to be policemen killed if the parade did not go through. They were saying they had had enough and they were excited.”
Duncan McCausland, the PSNI deputy chief constable in charge of Belfast, was getting the same information in intelligence reports. He was expecting paramilitary involvement and large-scale rioting, and on the day he came prepared. McCausland had called 1,000 troops and 1,000 police officers onto the streets, backed up with helicopters, spy planes, six water cannon and a field hospital.
The immediate cause of the trouble was the decision of the Parades Commission to reroute the annual Whiterock parade for 70 yards, to avoid nationalist houses on the Springfield Road.
Orangemen had walked the route on July 12 without incident and, whereas in other areas the Orange order refuses to meet residents’ groups, they had been in a form of dialogue with Springfield Road through the North and West Belfast Parades forum. They had met senior republicans and residents groups and had postponed the parade in June to allow for further dialogue.
Tommy Cheevers, an Orangeman who chaired the forum, said: “I’ve been involved in talking for years. I’ve been Mr Reasonable. I have worked with residents and with the police. I’ve done the whole public responsibility thing and what have I got? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
This feeling of getting nothing is fairly widespread on the Shankill, which votes overwhelmingly for the DUP and which is represented at Westminster by Gerry Adams. Nigel Dodds, the DUP MP for North Belfast, said: “People see the government delivering things to the nationalist/republican community and they feel the unionist side is being ignored. Right across the unionist community you get a deep feeling of angst.
“The government has announced a cut in the Royal Irish Regiment. Peter Hain ordered the release of Sean Kelly, an IRA bomber who killed nine people on the Shankill, as soon as the IRA made a statement. That was a political decision to please Sinn Fein. Now the Orange Order is stopped marching. It all goes deep in the unionist psyche.”
His wife, Diana, who topped the poll for the Shankill in the Assembly elections, believes that there is a policy of appeasing paramilitaries, both loyalist and republican. Paramilitaries are validated when government departments steer funds towards organisations that employ ex-prisoners in an effort to buy peace.
“Over 80% of the Shankill votes DUP,” Diana Dodds said. “They didn’t vote for people with guns, and the government needs to recognise that you cannot bypass the elected representatives. In many cases it is the people who cause the problems who get the funding.
“There is no strategic plan. Central government piecemeal funds this, that and the other, but never within a strategic context. Funding is churned out to the community and in many cases they institutionalise paramilitarism while doing it.”
On the ground the discontent is palpable, and at times it verges on the absurd. In the offices of the PUP, the political wing of the UVF, which the police feel was behind most of the armed violence of the past week, there is a great deal of discontent over parking tickets and a general feeling that republicans are being favoured by the PSNI traffic branch.
Strange as it may seem, Jim McDonald, a member of the party, regards this as a hugely important issue. “Go and look up the Falls and the Springfield Road,” he orders. “The cars are parked up all over the place, but the police do nothing about it.”
He even believes that a series of burglaries in the area were left unpunished because the police found that the culprits were Catholics.
Protestants on the Albertbridge Road — another cockpit of violence during the loyalist riots — complain of frequent verbal harassment from police.
Locals say that, during police raids linked to the UVF and LVF feud in the Woodvale area in August, a middle-aged man was “maced” by officers. “He got out of his taxi and saw the police everywhere,” one UVF supporter said. “He asked ‘What’s going on?’ and this peeler came over and just sprayed his face right away. The guy was drunk and harmless. He was near blinded.
“Immediately the cry is ‘What’s our ones (paramilitaries) going to do?’ The people wanted a reaction. That’s what happened at the West Circular Road last Saturday.”
Most people on the Shankill say the UVF, whose ceasefire is no longer recognised by the government, has done well out of last weekend’s confrontation. One well-known local community leader, who did not wish to be named, said: “The UVF doesn’t know where it’s going, but they know they have the backing of the community. There are old men who say they’d be happy to riot. Many people are happy that the organisation has stood up.”
Locals also argue that there were no plans to get paramilitaries involved in the riot at first. It was only when the police started firing plastic bullets that loyalists went in search of their own weapons.
“The police went charging in there with plastic bullets, firing them through people’s windows, and that’s when the guns came out,” said a UVF supporter. “The guns came out in Highfield, that’s a hotbed of paramilitaries. It’s not difficult to put your hands on weapons in those areas.
“Nobody would welcome gun attacks, but understanding it and condoning it are two different things.”
Chris McGimpsey, a local businessman and Ulster Unionist representative, admits that the Shankill’s grievances are hard to pin down. “If Peter Hain said to me ‘What six things do you want?’, I don’t know if I could answer him in those terms. It’s all about alienation. There is concession after concession to republicans. A Protestant child in west Belfast is three times more likely to fail the 11-plus than a Catholic.”
The rioting “makes no sense but people see no alternative”.
Statistically, the grievances don’t stack up. The Shankill is an extremely deprived area suffering urban blight, the loss of heavy industry, which once guaranteed employment to school-leavers, and the ravages of a series of paramilitary feuds, which have set family against family since the days of Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair.
However, the sectarian analysis that Protestants are, overall, losing out to Catholics is no more convincing than the tales of sectarian discrimination in the issue of traffic tickets. British government statistics show that, although the gap is narrowing, Catholics are still more likely to be unemployed than Protestants and that two-thirds of people in the 20 most deprived wards in the north are Catholics.
John Simpson, a local economist who was co-author of a 2003 official report on the rejuvenation of the Shankill and West Belfast, believes that the question is how to reduce deprivation in an entire Belfast inner-urban area that shares similar problems. “It should not be a question of ‘Did they do better than us or did we do better than them?’”
But loyalists are endlessly fascinated by comparisons with the nationalist community, even when it comes to licking their wounds after last week’s violence. They insist that the PSNI went a lot harder on the Shankill rioters than they would have on nationalists. They tell how plastic bullets caused one man to lose an eye, another to have his nose crushed, another to have his scalp torn at his forehead, how it took 40 stitches to put it back on.
They quote official statistics relating how 22 baton rounds were fired at nationalists during disturbances in Ardoyne on July 12 and how 80 police were injured. After the rerouted Whiterock parade, around 150 baton rounds were fired at loyalists by police and 30 officers were injured.
“That just shows you who’s the most ferocious,” said one local. “Gerry Kelly of Sinn Fein has said it’s only nationalists who get plastic bullets fired at them. Gerry Kelly got his answer.”
WHILE Orangemen such as McCann believe the order is being manipulated by more sinister forces, including paramilitaries, there is an argument that the boot is on the other foot. Could it be that the Orange Order tapped into a volatile mix of popular grievance and paramilitary feuding for the muscle it needed to try and push its marches through?
Sammy Duddy, a veteran spokesman of the Ulster Political Research Group, the political wing of the UDA, which stayed largely out of last week’s violence, thinks that is at least partly true.
“This has come about because the government has been saying to the loyalists ‘You have no clout; we are dealing with Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA, who can threaten another Canary Wharf’. There is a feeling that they have the inside track with the government and Protestants don’t,” he said.
“That being said, this rioting is only bringing grief to poverty stricken areas and it’s the wrong way to go about anything. It’s time to admit that the Orange Order has always used the paramilitaries as the big stick. They use them to police their parades through contentious areas. They use them as their army when it suits and then wash their hands if things turn out badly.
“It is time somebody made a point of that. Certain sections of the UDA are now saying, ‘No more are we going to be used by the Orange order’.”
There are rumours that the order plans a series of protests in the next week and may file for permission to stage the Whiterock Parade again. There may still be more trouble to come from alienated Ulster Protestants.
POLICE WERE ‘BLATANTLY PROVOCATIVE’, SAYS WITNESS
ALEX BENJAMIN is an Ulster Unionist official who witnessed last Saturday’s disturbances in Belfast from the party offices
I am not Protestant, I am not an Orangeman. I come from a Jewish background, I was born in London and I lived in England until 1991. So I have no axe to grind and have always been supportive of the police. I still am, but their handling of the situation in east Belfast last weekend, which I witnessed first-hand, exacerbated and escalated the situation, in my opinion.
What I saw last Saturday was a provocative, rampant police, completely uninterested in taking effective measures to calm things down, instead opting for heavy-handed tactics leading to an escalation.
I was working in Sir Reg Empey’s offices in east Belfast last Saturday at 2pm as Orangemen and their supporters gathered outside the Orange Hall before making their way to the Albertbridge Road to make a peaceful protest. There they came under sustained stoning and bottling from Short Strand residents, who had clearly come prepared.
The police response to these attacks was woefully inadequate. Rather than move in to prevent them, they more or less stood by and allowed the situation to develop. When loyalists began to return stones, the police eventually sprang into action. Later I saw the police surging up the Albertbridge Road. They knocked women to the ground with their vehicles, pushing and hitting people who were in their way. These weren’t rioters with scarves around their faces brandishing petrol bombs, but women and political representatives who were trying to reason with the police.
The Ulster Unionist offices became a safe haven. In the street I saw an elderly man forced to the ground and having his head truncheoned. When he raised his hands, they were truncheoned too. The force was so great it split his finger open. We managed to get him, concussed and rambling, inside the offices and administered some basic first aid. Others followed, young and old, with head and other injuries.
We called an ambulance, which arrived swiftly and departed just as swiftly as some of those injured were reluctant to go to hospital. The ambulance driver said that the crew couldn’t get out to treat the wounds.
The police, now right outside our offices, were clearly enjoying the situation, laughing and smiling to each other and I heard some shouting “Orange bastards” at protestors. Many pointed rifles or plastic bullet weapons at people. It was blatantly provocative.
As a communications professional, I am aware of the mechanisms that can be used to get your point across in the media. The police and secretary of state have been quick to apportion blame and the media have been quick to adopt their line. Too quick, in my view.
Having witnessed first-hand the police tactics employed, my faith and trust in the PSNI has taken a substantial hammering.
