DUBLIN — Outlawed paramilitary groups remain an ever-present danger in Northern Ireland — and the U.K. region’s chronic lack of local government at Stormont is a big part of the reason why, according to an expert panel.
The Independent Reporting Commission said repeated breakdowns of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing administration since 1999 have “had the effect of prolonging instability and mitigating against the kind of sustained, cross-party policy interventions, strategic decision-making and approaches that are needed to address the range of factors involved in continued paramilitarism.”
The commission was created in 2016 by the British and Irish governments and Northern Ireland’s administration — at a time when the cross-community coalition was still functioning — to analyze the paramilitary threat and identify the best ways to end it.
But as its latest 154-page report highlights, the commission said the ongoing Brexit-driven political stalemate at Stormont is “inhibiting efforts to end paramilitarism in Northern Ireland.”
You may like
Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party supposed to be leading the Stormont administration following its victory in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, welcomed the findings.
The Democratic Unionists — the pro-British party blocking government formation as part of its nearly three-year protest against post-Brexit trade rules that treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the U.K. — declined immediate comment. An official said party officers had yet to read the report.
The commissioners are former U.S. envoy Mitchell Reiss, retired Irish civil servant Tim O’Connor, Northern Ireland lawyer John McBurney and Monica McWilliams, former leader of a defunct center-ground political party called the Women’s Coalition that was involved in the talks that produced the Good Friday accord of 1998. That landmark peace deal sought the disarmament of paramilitary groups as a first step toward their eventual disbandment.
The main Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army did renounce violence and disarm in 2005, but the commissioners found that rival illegal gangs remain deeply embedded in the most hard-line communities today: small breakaway factions of the IRA on one side, and the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) on the other.
While by most objective metrics the level of violence and intimidation emanating from those groups is sharply lower than a decade ago, the report cited the latest official data to document how they still cast a menacing shadow over everyday life in many working-class districts of Belfast and Londonderry, where dozens of people are assaulted each year in paramilitary "punishment" attacks.
It found paramilitaries responsible for 17 shootings and two bombings since April.
In the 12-month period from April 2022 to March 2023, it found that 194 families received emergency rehousing because of paramilitary intimidation, an upsurge driven by UDA infighting in Protestant districts east of Belfast.
The report noted that police investigated 509 cases of intimidation in Northern Ireland, including 120 death threats, over the same period.
The commissioners said ending community support for paramilitarism required a focused and functioning Stormont able to oversee well-funded multi-year projects that develop the existing Tackling Paramilitarism strategy. They called on the U.K. government to appoint a diplomat to liaise directly with paramilitary chiefs on ways of channeling their members away from crime and toward useful community work.
“There are those who would argue that paramilitaries should just ‘go away.’ We respectfully respond that wishing something away is not a policy,” they wrote.