Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The effect of paramilitary activity and organised crime on society in Northern Ireland, HC 24
Wednesday 23 November 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 23 November 2022.
Members present: Simon Hoare (Chair); Sir Robert Buckland; Stephen Farry; Mary Kelly Foy; Sir Robert Goodwill; Claire Hanna; Carla Lockhart; Ian Paisley; Bob Stewart; Mr Robin Walker.
Questions 231 - 254
Witnesses
II: Daniel Holder, Deputy Director, Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ); Úna Boyd, Immigration Project Solicitor and Coordinator, Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ).
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ)
Witnesses: Daniel Holder and Úna Boyd.
Q231 Chair: It is my pleasure to now welcome Daniel Holder—it is very nice to see you back in front of the Committee—deputy director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, and Úna Boyd, the immigration projects solicitor and co-ordinator for the Committee on the Administration of Justice. You are both very welcome and thank you for joining us this morning.
Let me kick off panel two with the same question that I seem to be asking everybody, which means that I can try to remember my question and, one day, I might get it right. It is on the terminology of paramilitaries and paramilitarism. It adds a certain, I am sure, lustre or status in the minds of some people, or a sense of self-applied importance for people who might otherwise feel that they do not have a role, who feel rather insignificant in society, et cetera. What is your thinking on that issue?
You will have heard in question one that we have been taking evidence where people have pointed to the child grooming and child abuse element of this, and to people trafficking, modern slavery, indentured labour, gangmasters, and so forth. Your views on that issue would be welcome.
Daniel Holder: The term “paramilitary” has been around for quite a while. We have tended to increasingly use, I have to say, the term “armed groups”. I do think, though, that there is merit in characterising some of the actions that are undertaken by armed groups. Using some of the terminology that you suggest, to throw a few more in, paramilitary-style attacks are a form of torture. We would not shy away from that word being used.
In addition, in terms of our area of focus and our research, which you will have seen from the written evidence, we have focused a lot on housing intimidation and some of the accompanying expression. Calling out paramilitary expression or paramilitary protected expression that is designed for the purposes of racist and sectarian intimidation as such is also helpful. Calling stuff out that is racist and that is sectarian delegitimises that type of activity.
That said, I do not think that it would be comprehensive enough just to deal with the issue of paramilitarism as some sort of extended crime wave. I am sure that that is not what is being suggested. The harms of paramilitarism and the nature of the groups are much broader, and will need a tailored and very different process.
Chair: That was very much the professor’s view of that sort of granular approach.
Daniel Holder: Conflating the whole thing just as an organised crime issue would not be effective. A broader strategy is needed in terms of getting these groups out of business, which is what we all want, that goes beyond criminal law.
Q232 Chair: You are the first witness in this inquiry to use the word “torture”, which is a very powerful word. For the record, which would be helpful to this Committee and to the wider audience who may read or listen to our evidence, could you give us one or two examples of cases that you have looked at, heard about, read about or been briefed on that legitimise the use of that word “torture” and how it has been deployed?
Daniel Holder: The word “torture” has a very specific legal meaning. As you know, it is protected under article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, is part of the Good Friday Agreement, is incorporated into Northern Ireland law and is a key part of the peace process.
Q233 Chair: I was not questioning the legitimacy of the use of the word. I was merely asking you just to evidence it for the record.
Daniel Holder: In terms of that threshold and that legal standard, de facto—and I am not talking now about individual cases—all punishment shootings and punishment beatings meet that threshold and should be rightly considered as acts of torture. We are on a different path at the moment, but, if we end up with a proper ECHR-compliant process for dealing with the past, it would have to be able to deal with and investigate issues of torture, which would include punishment-style attacks, as they have been called, or paramilitary-style attacks, which is the phrase that this Committee has been using.
Q234 Chair: There is going to be a differential, is there not, in community response and possibly authorities’ response? If somebody is trying to muscle into somebody else’s turf, they get beaten up or shot in the leg, or whatever it may happen to be, which will engender a set of responses. If somebody is peddling drugs in an area where the police are not a viable presence, they get taken off and sorted out. A lot of people would see the people who do the sorting out or who do the torture as local heroes, would they not? How do we address that? How do we take away this caped crusader, community champion approach?
Daniel Holder: Essentially, you are asking, “How do we end paramilitary-style attacks?” That is a very difficult question. You would have to have the will of the groups themselves to go out of business, which requires some sort of process with those in existence. Thankfully, within the mainstream IRA, that process of punishment violence has ended in that sense, where there was the political will more broadly to go out of business. With other groups, you would need to work with the elements who were willing to transition. You would have to have some sort of process. They would have to have the authority within those groups to carry that through.
When you are dealing with groups that are very factionalised and disparate, that is going to be an awful lot more difficult. You would also have to have some sort of alternative in place, and that is where the successes of the various restorative justice schemes at community level come in. You do need some sort of transitional process, which is not really in place at the moment, in order to move that issue forward.
Q235 Sir Robert Goodwill: In her evidence in the first session, Professor Breen-Smyth talked about people living in pockets. If you are talking about the Falls Road, the Shankill or the Bogside, you know exactly which communities you are talking about. People living in segregated housing send their children to schools that are, in effect, segregated. What evidence is there that paramilitary intimidation is a major driving factor behind housing segregation?
Daniel Holder: Housing intimidation is pretty rife. We know that from the statistics, and they are in the written evidence, but there are hundreds of cases every year.
Q236 Sir Robert Goodwill: Does it have to be overt or do people just understand that it is not a good idea to go and live in that area?
Daniel Holder: It is the latter. The recorded cases really are the tip of the iceberg. People will generally know where it is not safe to live, because of their background, and where they are likely to face sectarian or racist intimidation if they move into a particular area.
One of the issues, however, which we raise in our written evidence, is that there are significant data gaps here. You can map where some of the pockets are by where the attacks are taking place, but sometimes journalists have had to try to work out, from what limited information they have been able to get under freedom of information, in which areas housing intimidation and people being made homeless through paramilitary intimidation is occurring. The disaggregated data that you would need is not being produced, in terms of setting out which groups are responsible for this in which area.
The PSNI and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive are making assessments on individuals that “must be rehoused”, because they would be at risk of serious injury or death if they were not moved out of that situation. We would like to see a situation whereby the state response to that moves beyond simply verifying that the threat is credible and moving the victim. At the moment, it is not even being properly documented what patterns there are in particular areas or which group is felt to be responsible. It is known, if you are making that assessment, but information on patterns is not being made available. If you produced the pocket-type map that you are suggesting, the policing services and other public authorities would have something to go on in terms of a strategy for dealing with this.
What is remarkable is that this is rife and is known in the areas in which it occurs. It is known that it is unsafe and that you cannot live there. It is part of a much broader pattern of paramilitary coercion, but it is not mentioned anywhere in the Executive’s action plan to tackle paramilitarism. Nor was it mentioned in the 2015 assessment of paramilitary groups, commissioned by the Secretary of State, which had a long list of areas of criminality that named paramilitary groups were involved in, from drugs to counterfeit goods and things like that, but made no reference to housing intimidation, despite how prevalent it is.
It made no reference to racism or to sectarianism, despite the well-documented and connected links between some elements of loyalist paramilitarism and racist violence. It was not mentioned at all, so there are clear omissions in the strategy and in the practice of public authorities in dealing with this very serious issue.
We also find that a related issue to this is the use of paramilitary expression. I am not talking about legitimate political expression but about the use of flags or other items to mark an area of territory as a form of racist and sectarian intimidation. It could be in the form of, say, a black family moving into a street and paramilitary or union flags being put up to try to intimidate them out of the property or, indeed, having a new shared housing development and paramilitary flags being put up to deter people from other communities.
At the moment, there is a policy not only of non-intervention by the PSNI with such displays, but, in some circumstances, of protecting that paramilitary expression, because it is all done through the lens of public order. “Will the people who put this up riot if it is taken down? Therefore, we will prevent it from being taken down”. In that sense, you lead, paradoxically, to a situation where you incentivise and institutionalise paramilitary control of public space. There are a lot more state interventions and different approaches that could be but are not taken to deal with this particular issue. It is a source of huge concern.
Q237 Sir Robert Goodwill: Would that extend to businesses—either the ownership or maybe people employed in a business? If you are in a particular area, would you be very much discouraged from taking on staff who maybe came from a different area?
Daniel Holder: I am sure that the answer to that question is yes. A specific focus of our research has been on housing intimidation, but workplace intimidation has been a problem for many years. It is one of the areas where there has been at least a degree of success through quite vociferous equality law and intervening in changing the composition of workforces, as well as being able to deal with harassment in the workplace.
Q238 Chair: You referenced in your written evidence the issue of housing intimidation. What has been the effect of not including housing intimidation in the overall assessments and what is the route to getting it being so?
Daniel Holder: One issue that was raised by your previous witness is viewing everything through the national security lens. I know that another member had asked for a definition of that. From our perspective, strategies to tackle paramilitarism need to deal with all the harms created by armed groups, whether they are targeted at the state or at individual citizens. If you take the annual threat assessment that is conducted by the security service and published by the Northern Ireland Office—the Northern Ireland-related terrorism threat, separate to the UK threat—it focuses on national security threats. This is teased out in the reviewer’s reports.
Things like housing intimidation are not included at all in that threat assessment. Threat assessment ultimately focuses mainly on threats to the state, the majority of which have been to police officers and are from dissident republicans. The majority, but not all, of housing intimidation comes from loyalist groups, so it is not factored into that threat assessment.
But then the resource issue kicks into this. We have issues with the arrangement of the national security resource through MI5 in terms of an accountability gap that it creates. The problem is that you end up with very significant resources going into tackling a particular element of the paramilitary threat, which is important, but the same resources not going into tackling this particular phenomenon of housing intimidation, which is not even considered as part of the official assessment of paramilitary threat. That may be one of the reasons why it was missed out of the 2015 assessment, and its omission from the 2015 assessment has had a knock-on effect, in that it is not in the action plans then picked up by Stormont.
Q239 Chair: Are there alternative approaches that could be used to verify?
Daniel Holder: Yes. There are alternative approaches that can be used to deal with the issue far more broadly. We need to move away from simply verifying that a threat is credible and moving the victim. It is almost as if this area has become normalised. As in the previous answer, it is not even properly documented. The patterns are not put out there.
The policing board has raised questions about this. At times, the police have even said, “We do not know what policing purpose it would serve”. It was pretty clear. If you identify the patterns of paramilitary intimidation on housing and which groups are responsible, then you can develop a strategy to deal with that, to intervene and to begin to convict people of these offences.
Intimidation is a criminal offence. When The Detail, the investigative website, looked at this a number of years ago, they identified a couple of thousand cases of paramilitary intimidation and only 32 convictions, so clearly the rule of law needs to be applied to this area. We should cease approaches that are simply trying to manage this type of paramilitary activity and are effectively normalising it rather than dealing with it.
Q240 Chair: You will be aware, Mr Holder, that this Committee held an inquiry relatively recently on the impact and experience of migrant and immigrant communities coming to Northern Ireland. Would you say a word or two about housing intimidation that you might be aware of with regard to those communities?
Daniel Holder: Yes, I will do. I will maybe pass to my colleague Úna as well.
Chair: Ms Boyd, let us hear from you.
Úna Boyd: Daniel can start. I will come in. He was on a roll.
Daniel Holder: There have been clear links identified for a long time between elements of loyalist paramilitaries and racist violence. That was brought up by the previous Independent Reporting Commission. A German magazine dubbed Belfast the race hate capital of Europe at one point, and that experience is pretty rife. We have heard the theory that there are more attacks against ethnic minorities in mostly unionist areas because that is where most ethnic minorities live. We think that is a flawed assessment.
Q241 Chair: Why?
Daniel Holder: Black people do not bring racism to an area by living there. That is the simplest way of putting it. Racism is an ideology. It is supremacism and contempt for people of other ethnic groups. There are racist attacks in particular areas because there are armed groups who practise racism, and they target people in particular areas. There are racist attitudes across the community in different places. Unless there is an armed group there prepared to practise racism, that does not turn it into a racist attack.
There are plenty of nationalist areas where there are no racist attacks. There are plenty of mostly unionist areas where there are no racist attacks, but areas where there are loyalist paramilitaries involved in racist violence tend to be areas where there are racist attacks. The thematic review of the Policing Board into race hate crimes looked into this, and there is not necessarily a correlation between where people live and where there are attacks. It is where there are orchestrated groups being involved in these attacks.
Q242 Chair: You are prepared to make that distinction that racist attacks manifest themselves in self-styled loyalist areas but not, if I heard you correctly, in mainstream unionist areas, if one can use that phrase.
Daniel Holder: I am sure there are plenty of mostly loyalist areas, if we want to use that term, where there are no racist attacks either. What I am saying is that the racist attacks are concentrated. The PSNI did have a hotspot map at one point. Areas where there are active loyalist paramilitaries conducting those attacks is the correlation, not necessarily the community background of the areas people are living in.
Q243 Chair: Would you or would you not append socioeconomic criteria? Picking up on the professor’s point of anger versus despair, there are people who would say, “I feel very marginalised within this process and this society. I do not feel I have a voice. How can I make my voice heard?”
Daniel Holder: If the political climate exists where people scapegoat migrants and other groups, and anger can be turned into racism, that makes the situation more volatile. I remain of the view that, in terms of actual intimidation from housing and violent attacks, the main correlation is with groups that are prepared to carry that out, but clearly the levels of prejudice will be influential in the climate that is created. Political leaders on both sides of the water have a responsibility there.
Q244 Chair: I presume you would like to see more done in schools in those areas.
Daniel Holder: In terms of anti-racism, yes, that would be helpful.
Úna Boyd: After we submitted our evidence to the Committee, we published a joint research report called “Frontline Lessons”. It is a collaborative research piece with frontline organisations working with the migrant or minority ethnic community. Essentially, we were trying to map the impact of immigration law and policy in post-Brexit Northern Ireland, so the scope was fairly broad. What came out of that research meant that we have an entire chapter looking at racist hate crimes and incidents. I will provide this report to the Committee afterwards.
Chair: That would be helpful, thank you.
Úna Boyd: When we were speaking to frontline organisations, we pulled out four key issues that we are focused on. The first, which Daniel has just referred to, is the impact of broader immigration law and policy on community discourse, racist hate crimes and the knock-on effect of things like the Nationality and Borders Act and the rhetoric that is coming out of that. Paramilitary connections to racist hate crimes and housing intimidation were two of the biggest issues that frontline organisations raised to us, and they said that they were completely connected. The last, which is also linked, was lack of confidence in policing and the justice system.
There is a huge amount of evidence that migrant and minority ethnic people are being severely impacted by housing intimidation, and there is a lot of frustration. Again, this is relevant to the data being collated and what is included in strategic plans. The people working directly with impacted communities were really frustrated that this is not being called out. One person phrased it as “cowardice” on the part of public bodies and politicians to not acknowledge the link between racist hate crimes, paramilitaries and housing intimidation.
It is really key that the Committee refers back to the evidence received from groups like Migrant Centre NI and Housing Rights in the previous inquiry. They reference this as a root issue that is being overlooked because it is potentially too sensitive and too complex. If you do not deal with it, the knock-on impact on housing intimidation and hate crimes is that they cannot be properly tackled.
Q245 Stephen Farry: We have touched on these issues to a certain extent, but I want to ask Daniel and Úna to talk a bit more about what policy responses we should see from the Government agencies, not just the PSNI, but the Housing Executive, in this regard. This can be summed up in one sense that the current policy response of the authorities is to move the victim and not to challenge the perpetrator.
Daniel Holder: Yes, I think that is a fair assessment. At one level, this issue really needs to be part of the strategic policies to tackle paramilitarism, because it is such a glaring omission. The system, as it works at the moment, is essentially that, whenever the Housing Executive gets someone who wants to move because of a threat, it will make a referral to the PSNI. It may also make a referral to a unit called Base2 within NIACRO—the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders—which has the community interface role of verifying if a paramilitary threat is real through interlocutors. Then the victim can be moved. They can get an emergency support payment.
As your question suggests, Mr Farry, it is very much an intervention that involves verifying that the threat is credible and moving the victim, rather than an approach of having a strategy to end housing intimidation and to ensure it does not happen by mapping the groups who are involved and then taking criminal justice responses against them.
The second area, which I had alluded to as well, is what often preludes collective housing intimidation, in terms of the use of expression that is either put up by paramilitaries or protected by paramilitaries in public spaces, which is a much broader issue. I referenced earlier on some of the issues when things are put up for the purposes of racist or sectarian intimidation. That is one thing. Sometimes items are put up that are clearly political expression. You might see a poster that says, “Down with the protocol”. That is political expression.
It is important to get a sense of this. Say you lived in a particular area of paramilitary control and you held a different view, so you wanted to take that poster down or put up a poster with an alternative message. “Up with the protocol” does not really trip off the tongue, but you know what I mean. If you put that poster up or if you took down the poster widely perceived to have been put up with paramilitary protection, you may be facing a death threat or a paramilitary-style attack. That is akin to not living in a democracy, but living in some form of dictatorship whereby only regime messaging is allowed in a public space.
The problem with the policing response to that is that the police have internal operational guidance that was never formally put through a policy process and was kept secret for years. When we were doing our research, they released it to us for reasons we do not yet know, but we are very grateful for it. That set out the approach they had, and it said that, whenever there is expression in public spaces, you have to look at relevant criminal offences, but the relevant criminal offences did not include intimidation, stirring up hatred or harassment. In fact, it did not really include anything beyond consideration of public order impacts.
In essence, the police would not take down an item if there was going to be a public order impact, such as paramilitaries rioting if it was taken down. Paradoxically, they would even prevent third parties from doing so, and there are instances of people being arrested for removing paramilitary expression in case the groups riot.
That puts us in an almost pre-Parades Commission position with this type of expression, in the sense that whoever presents the greatest threat prevails, rather than having a rule of law framework—not one that targets every form of political expression, because that is a far bigger issue. There are obviously rights to expression, but if you take the most harmful form of paramilitary expression, which is the stuff that intimidates people from housing and things like that, there is a need for a framework within which public authorities intervene and take reasonable steps to remove it.
Q246 Stephen Farry: I am very conscious that you are a human rights organisation. Can you maybe tell us a little bit more about the balancing or the reconciliation of the different rights—the right to freedom of expression versus the right not to be intimidated? This is something that CAJ has written on quite extensively in the past.
Daniel Holder: It is, and the way the European Court’s jurisprudence has gone on this has also been quite helpful in the last decade, in that it has codified far better this boundary between what is protected free expression on the one hand and what is hate expression on the other hand. The right to freedom of expression is obviously in play, but there is also article 8 of the convention, which is the right to family and private life. That holds that there is a positive duty on the state to proactively tackle racist expression, for example. It does not necessarily mean criminalising it. There are other steps that a state can take in terms of criminalising the incitement to hatred, which is the most serious form of hate expression.
That case law has been teased out significantly. The problem we have with the PSNI guidelines is that they mention the article 10 right to freedom of expression, with no reference at all to the article 8 rights of those at whom that type of intimidatory expression could be targeted.
Q247 Chair: There is a devastating and depressing irony that many who would say, “Northern Ireland is as British as Finchley”, to use Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, deploy behaviours that would not be tolerated in Finchley. Then others who say, “Northern Ireland is as Irish as Dublin” will use behaviours that would not be tolerated in Dublin. These behaviours are of a complete antithesis to the traditions to which they are seeking to adhere. Sometimes I think they just do not see the irony of that.
Daniel Holder: Yes, I agree. While I am not aware of the situation on the ground in Finchley, I would imagine that it is quite dissimilar to what we have been describing. It makes a mockery of the rule of law when you have a particular framework and an offence of intimidation from housing that is not routinely applied.
Úna Boyd: This is something that members of the migrant and minority ethnic community often express frustration about. The priority of moving people from homes is a really good example. This is quite unique to Northern Ireland, and people who have only recently moved there cannot understand why this would be the policy and why, even though they are a victim, they are being told they need to move house rather than the crime being tackled directly.
Q248 Chair: We would not tolerate it in North Dorset. Why should we tolerate it in north Belfast or anywhere else in Northern Ireland, for that matter. This is one of my usual Ronnie Corbett-esque things. It is annoying that too often policymakers and politicians say, “Oh, it’s Northern Ireland, so we have to have a greater level of tolerance. It’s all part of the history”. At some point, somebody just has to say, “No, that is wrong. We have to deal with it in the same way that we would anywhere else within the United Kingdom”.
Daniel Holder: I would imagine that, if graffiti advocating genocide against a particular section of your constituency was routinely placed on the walls of North Dorset, that would be speedily removed. One of the problems we face is precisely the normalisation of that type of graffiti—either “Kill all Taigs” or “Kill all Huns”—which is essentially advocating genocide against one side of the community. It is not routinely removed from walls. Sometimes you have to battle to get that type of thing removed. There is not a sufficient public authority response, despite the gravity of the harms of what that is projecting on to future generations. Essentially, the state is allowing that to remain up.
Q249 Chair: This trend towards the almost touristic nature of murals is growing. It is not helpful, is it?
Daniel Holder: We probably should not say that tourism is not helpful. I would want to make a distinction between the broader political expression.
Q250 Chair: Tourism is, of course, a good thing, but it depends what one is being touristic to.
Daniel Holder: Yes. What we have suggested in our own research is that yes, there is political expression. Yes, there are the boundaries of free expression and things like that, but what we should really drill down on is this issue of where something is hate expression. Graffiti advocating genocide is an absolute no-brainer. Sometimes displays may just be flags or other items, but they are there in a particular context in which they clearly constitute a form of racism or sectarian intimidation from housing.
Instead of trying to deal with all issues over flags and all issues over expression, which has been a much broader problem, we think we should focus on the harms of the most harmful forms of expression, those that project hate. There is an interface with paramilitarism here in the sense that the very reason why a lot of that stuff is not removed is because of paramilitary involvement in it or perceived paramilitary protection of it.
Q251 Sir Robert Buckland: You have already directly referred to the issue of data and the quality of it. I was particularly struck by your comment that you thought there was a level of obfuscation with regard to the aggregation of data that can be related to paramilitary intimidation. “Obfuscation” is quite a strong word in the sense that it suggests a deliberate muddying of the waters. I know that the Northern Ireland Policing Board had asked this very question about five or six years ago, when it was told it was very complex, and nothing seems to have happened since. Do you think it is obfuscation or has it just been filed in a “too difficult” column and, therefore, resources and capacity meant they have not got round to doing it properly? I agree with you that it should be done.
Daniel Holder: I am going to stand over “obfuscation”. This data can be produced. I do not see insurmountable practical impediments to producing it, so it is difficult to come up with an alternative to the view that there is resistance to producing this type of data. It is doable and is not being done.
Q252 Sir Robert Buckland: Why do you think there is resistance? Certainly, to my untutored eye it almost beggars belief that they would not want to know that information.
Daniel Holder: We have been trying to get to the bottom of this, but there is a sense, in general terms, that, as long as paramilitaries are on ceasefire and that is relatively keeping a lid on things, the state just needs to manage broader paramilitary activity, and that any further intervention might actually make things worse.
This is often the argument that is brought up—“Yes, there were some flags put up to intimidate people from a new housing estate, but, if we took the five flags down, 100 would go up”. It would not be impossible, given that you know exactly where they are going to go up, to mount some sort of surveillance operation, conduct arrests and things like that. It seems as though there is almost an approach of saying, “We are keeping a lid on particular things and managing the level of activity. If we intervene, we will make things worse”. The flipside to that is that things are really bad at the moment for the people this affects, and things are not going to get any better unless an alternative approach is taken.
Sir Robert Buckland: That is a very clear answer, and I am grateful to you.
Q253 Mary Kelly Foy: You have talked about the racist and sectarian intimidation with regard to housing and the ineffectiveness of law and policy. What is the role of civil society in this, and in particular the trade unions, which are the biggest grouping of civil society? What role have they been playing in terms of anti-racist work in communities or dispelling some myths?
Daniel Holder: One of our strongest partnerships, which has been in place since the time of the peace process, is with one particular trade union, Unison, with which we jointly run a grouping called the Equality Coalition. There are over 100 member groups in that Equality Coalition, and it is jointly run by CAJ and Unison. It consists of ethnic minority groups, groups in the women’s sector, LGBT groups, et cetera, as well as the trade union movement, which, as you say, has the broadest cross-community representation. For example, a lot of our work on hate crimes issues has been done jointly through the mechanism of the Equality Coalition. Without that leverage from a mass organisation that is able to mobilise like the trade union movement, our work would be much more limited, so it has been an incredibly valuable partnership to us.
Úna Boyd: There are really positive examples of work happening in civil society, particularly focusing on the element of racist hate crimes. There is a hate crimes advocacy service run by Victim Support NI, which is a joint PSNI and Department of Justice programme. They do that with Migrant Centre NI, and intervene and advocate for people who have been victims of hate crime, including where there is a paramilitary element.
We also have organisations like the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme that are assisting people in reporting hate crimes and supporting them in that. One thing that consistently comes back in this is that, given the barriers we have discussed today, you can help people as much as you can, but if people feel that by reporting they are just going to get moved out of the house, while the person doing the intimidation is not going to be punished and nothing is going to change, that is a much bigger barrier than the support available.
Q254 Chair: In our closing minutes, is there anything you wanted to tell us that we have not asked a question to provide you with the platform to do so?
Daniel Holder: I am just looking through my long notes.
Chair: Do you have this Saturday’s lottery numbers?
Daniel Holder: One of the things we have made reference to is the issue of hate expression. There are recommendations coming out of the hate crimes review that was independently conducted by Judge Marrinan. Recommendation 15 provides for a statutory duty on relevant public authorities—it is not just a policing issue; you are talking about the Department for Infrastructure, the Housing Executive and others—to take reasonable steps to remove hate expression from public spaces. That is extremely useful.
That can be taken forward only when there is an Executive and legislature in place. That is pretty obvious. That said, when there was an Executive in place, we found it quite difficult to make progress on a lot of these issues. I know the Committee is running another inquiry, which we will also submit evidence to, on how some of those mechanisms could be reformed to make them more effective.
Chair: Thank you both very much indeed for appearing before us this morning and taking our questions. We are very grateful.