Written evidence submitted by Ulster University, Queens University Belfast, and Co-Operation Ireland regarding the effect of paramilitaries on society in Northern Ireland inquiry (PNI0006)

This submission has been made by Ulster University, Queens University Belfast, and Co-Operation Ireland. Representatives from these organisations have been working on issues directly relating to paramilitarism for the last two decades and more recently under the Tackling Paramilitarism, Criminality and Organised Crime Programme. The authors have responded specifically to three areas of interest set by the Committee.

The Effect of paramilitaries on society in Northern Ireland: How effective measures under the Fresh Start Agreement have been in combining police and justice measures and tackling socio-economic issues to eradicate paramilitarism in Northern Ireland.

The Communities in Transition (CIT) programme emerged from the Fresh Start Agreement (2015) and formed part of the Executive Action Plan on Tackling Paramilitary Activity in Northern Ireland (2016). CIT was one of 38 recommendations that formed the Action Plan and aligned with the commitment to ‘build capacity, confidence, and resilience in eight areas most negatively impacted by paramilitarism.[1]’ Since early 2020, CIT has funded over 30 innovative and community focused projects throughout eight designated sites. The projects are designed to increase the capacity of each area and are categorised under the following headings: Area Regeneration; Capacity Building; Community Safety and Policing; Environment and Culture; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Transition; Restorative Practice; and Young People.

In Summer 2020, we submitted a Mid-Term Evaluation of CIT (see https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/236811596/CIT.pdf), and our evaluation work is ongoing. Our work has assessed the overall efficiency of CIT, including the quality of the projects that CIT funds and the degree to which CIT is able to connect itself to the wider Tackling Paramilitarism Programme (TPP).

Throughout our work, we have stated that CIT has created a fluid and flexible set of community led projects that enable the programme to keep pace with emerging challenges in each site where CIT is active. We have also applauded the individuals managing these projects, who are leading the ambition of supporting transition in their community.

We have previously recommended that CIT needs to be situated more centrally in TPP and welcome recent evidence to indicate that this beginning to occur.

We have traced much of our evaluation work back to the initial principles of the programme (see below), to ensure the project has maintained a consistent conceptual approach:

1. Develop skills and confidence via an asset-based community approach.
2. Challenge negative community leadership by building the credibility of other groups and individuals.
3. Reducing risk factors for on-going and future recruitment by paramilitary groups.

Overall, we have identified two kinds of problem when confronting the issue of paramilitarism. One has been the ongoing practical impact of the criminal activity routinely carried out by paramilitary groups. The other is the sense of hopelessness that this behaviour can create in areas where the organisations are active. We noted that a coordinated law enforcement approach, in which the PSNI and the community work closely, in a sustained partnership, was required to confront the first problem we identified. We also indicated the importance of programmes like CIT, when we seek to find solutions for the second problem we have identified, which one of our participants described as the ‘beneath truth’ of areas where paramilitary groups are active. In this instance, CIT was directly supporting the identification of the local and personal vulnerabilities that make individuals and entire areas susceptible to paramilitary influence and control.

Having outlined our collective experiences and conclusions obtained from directly working evaluators of the CIT programme, we would now like to express some further thoughts that we feel are of relevance to this Inquiry. Whilst paramilitary groups are undoubtedly linked to organised crime, unlike many organised crime groups, paramilitaries are embedded within wider social groups and public activities in Northern Ireland. They are legitimised throughout areas, not only through the idea that they ‘defend’ their community, but sometimes by the provision of real services. For over 50 years they have undertaken activities, including policing activities, which are appreciated by some those living in these areas. These groups carry some political legitimacy and are visible in events, such as parades, in many parts in Northern Ireland, and they display their existence on murals and flags that are rarely removed. These groups are sewn into the weft and weave of everyday life.

Moreover, the local context within which these groups exist varies from area to area. Consequently, devising responses that will be universally applicable is difficult. There needs to be an understanding that even one paramilitary group can exist quite differently in two comparable areas. For this reason, we support the approach taken by projects like CIT that adopt a site-specific approach and looks to create bespoke interventions. We recognise that there is at times a tension regarding whether a community assets-based approach, which seeks to build the capacity of respective sites, is favourable to a programme of measures that deal directly with groups and organisations responsible for paramilitary and criminal activity. It is our feeling that both approaches are required, especially as each comes with distinct challenges regarding their implementation. While the community assets-based approach has often proven to be difficult in its own right, finding ways to provide pathways to allow individuals and groups to move beyond paramilitarism has proven even more allusive.

Whether the approach of the UK Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to tackling paramilitarism is sufficiently sustained, resourced, and joined up?

In 2018 we undertook fieldwork in eight areas chosen identify factors enabling paramilitary activity to persist and actions that could be taken to support transition. See https://cooperationireland.org/communities-in-transition/reports/

Our findings reinforced need for change within statutory agencies, for example, for the PSNI to implement changes to policing in communities (Action A5) and for statutory agencies to review their protocols for engaging with representatives of paramilitary groups (Action A8) and reinforced the continuing need for wider socio-economic renewal in target communities and the complex and often ‘messy’ way in which issues of coercive control and social deprivation inter-relate. From the needs articulated and interventions proposed during phase 1 the CIT consortium identified a series of core intervention ‘themes’, subsequently commissioned as projects by the Executive Office. These were:  

•                   Policing and criminal justice: In all areas people a need for a form of policing that responded effectively to crime and better met local needs and to build understanding in communities the work and challenges facing the wider criminal justice system. 
•                   Young people: People identified a need for better support for the problems and challenges facing young people through a range of co-ordinated and sustained resources and opportunities for their future development. 
•                   Restorative justice and practice: support for the expansion of community based initiatives to complement the criminal justice system and respond promptly to local problems and issues. 

•                   Environment and culture: both transforming aspects of the physical environment (flags, murals, bonfires) and presenting new opportunities for positive expressions of culture (through arts) to mitigate against external negativities associated with these communities.
•                   Community development: Developing mechanisms that allow for people with a paramilitary past to engage in community development without the organisation or themselves being demonised.  
•                   Health and well-being: Drugs and personal debt as a prominent means through which forms of coercive control are being exerted over local people.  
•                   Personal transition: In the absence of organisations formally disbanding, there was a need to create pathways for individuals to both embrace and promote a culture of lawfulness.   

When we submitted our reports, we noted that the need for wider action to address the inter-related need for socio-economic renewal and for a transparent and clear means of co-ordination across the various actions in the B4 Transition Plans and the implementation of the other recommendations in the Action Plan to ensure the communities can identify meaningful transformations within their neighbourhoods.  

As individual initiatives were developed there was engagement with policy leads from across the Executive Action plan and mainstream policy areas to ensure complementarity. Since local delivery commenced there has been good engagement between Communities in Transition projects and local statutory agencies and service providers including the PSNI, councils, housing executive and local civic society. However, at a more strategic level further work is required to leverage the transformative potential of the wider Programme for Government in addressing this issue.

Moving forward the Tackling Paramilitarism Programme Benefits Management approach provides a mechanism to understand and corral the interconnections between disparate elements of the programme and the wider Programme for Government. However, it remains our belief that this work needs to be taken forward in a more co-ordinated way and considered in the context of broader socio-economic and community renewal.

The resource and timeframe allocated to the Tackling Paramilitarism programme is not sufficient to resolve paramilitary harm alone, but it would be sufficient to enact systemic changes that could enable the wider Programme for Government to positively impact this issue. Such a shift will require a sustained political support, which has thus far been sporadic, and a recognition that we all have a part to play in ending paramilitary harm.

Whether there should be a dedicated formal process of engagement with paramilitary organisations aimed at their disbandment. 

Before any consideration is given to a formal process there is a need to provide clarity around the language and its application within any process. Although the issue of paramilitary transition has been debated in Northern Ireland political life for many years, it is not clear that the terms are used both consistently and precisely. We have identified a number of terms which we think require a greater consensus on meaning:

Paramilitary:  The term ‘paramilitary’ is itself disputed across society.  In our experience it is never applied by republicans to themselves except in more recent years when describing behaviours such as ‘Paramilitary Style Attacks’. This leads to a misapprehension that any process to tackle ‘Paramilitarism’ is specifically, and perhaps politically, aimed at loyalists. 

Paramilitaries – Paramilitarism: on occasions these words are used interchangeably with an assumption that they carry the same meaning. However, it is important to distinguish between the two. Paramilitaries should refer to individuals and an organisation that are proscribed and support the use of armed violence. On the other hand, paramilitarism refers to the complete eco-system which ‘houses’ paramilitaries and includes the broader social, political, legal, economic, and cultural issues which shape communities.  Critically, a discussion on paramilitarism involves a question of culture change to democratic community development and the transition not only of groups and people but of activities undertaken by paramilitaries in communities up until now.

Transition:  The term transition implies movement from one state into another.  In relation to paramilitarism, it is clear that the idea of movement (process) has come to dominate over the question of end-state (outcome).  This has led to conversations and debates which sometimes appear to be negotiating both the movement and the end state.  It is important to clarify that neither the fact of movement (transition) nor the outcome (disbandment) are negotiable, although the means and mechanisms are.  To avoid doubt, it should be clear that the policy is directed at ‘transition to disbandment’, and that the purpose of negotiation is to establish the most appropriate and effective means to achieve this fixed aim.  Ultimately method must be agreed within the democratic political sphere.

Engagement:  There is a risk in using the term ‘engagement’ that disbandment is displaced as a fixed end point in which what is being negotiated is methods and timescales, but rather that the end-state goal is still in negotiation between the state and paramilitary groups.  Whereas engagement on method rather than goal implies a process owned and developed by the an external independent body in which paramilitary groups are consulted on options but not on the overall final destination. The risk of an unclear end-state is that it looks like a process framed and owned by the terms and priorities of paramilitaries.  Over many years, significant levels of engagement have already taken place between key stakeholders including politicians, NGOs, church leaders and armed groups in an attempt to ‘get them to leave the stage’. Potentially, the absence of resulting action towards disbandment now suggests that engagement is a delaying tactic which results in reinforcing the power and identity of paramilitaries in communities and actually delegitimises any potential transition process from the public’s perspective.

Reintegration:  The term reintegration means to ‘return as part of the whole of society’.  In peacebuilding, this concept derives from international concepts of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR).  After 25 years, this concept is at best only indirectly relevant to the current status of armed groups in Northern Ireland which is no longer dominated by the question of prisoner release but instead seeks to change behaviour of people already resident within communities.  It could be that the issues intended to emerge through a tackling paramilitarism programme are better described as ‘support for normalisation and participation’.

Disbandment: While the disbandment of paramilitary organisations is an agreed goal, the term continues to generate confusion and uncertainty about practicalities.  Firstly, disbandment is a process applying to organisations.  The starting point of any debate is that the goal of disbandment is for an organisation to have no identifiable presence or activity as a separate entity in communities.   In practice, some of the debate seems to fall short of this goal, allowing for the continuation of organisational structures and loyalty, including commemorations, memorialisation, and civilian membership, while abandoning any association with armed activity.  Some organisations have suggested that this involves a process of legal deproscription.   The question, therefore, is “when is disbandment, disbandment?”  Clarity on this issue is essential if society more broadly is to be satisfied that armed group activity across Northern Ireland has ‘gone away’ for more than a temporary period. 

Aside from the issues surrounding language and terminology it is evident that any process surrounding disbandment must also consider and recognise the following:

• In the absence of action, communities in which paramilitaries exist and operate will become more marginalised and disengaged from political and economic investment.

• Young people will continue to be at risk of becoming directly and indirectly involved with paramilitaries as the conditions exist to support their association for as long as there is not community-based alternatives supported broadly in politics and communities.

• The PSNI and the PCTF will not remove the presence of armed groups from communities, nor will they eradicate paramilitarism on their own.  This is a collaborative process.

• The pattern of condemning paramilitarism and repeatedly engaging directly and indirectly with paramilitaries and their associates at political level sends contradictory signals to the public.  It contributes to wider cynicism about any political intent to address this issue.

• There is currently little public appetite or support for any group transition process which is seen as providing specific financial incentives to members of paramilitary groups or organisations associated with them.

• The NI Executive alone (when it reconvenes) is unable to carry the burden of group transition to disbandment process on its own. This requires both the British and Irish governments to confirm the principles and process, provide the overall architecture and assurances around any process and share agreed risks. The NI Executive should have lead responsibility for implementation with both governments providing oversight, resources, and a level of accountability.

It is also important to recognise existing and potential risks and challenges around an engagement process with paramilitaries on the issue of disbandment:

• There may be a lack of public and local political support for such a process given the fact that paramilitary ceasefires took place in 1998, prisoners were released in 2000 and decommissioning took place up until 2010.

• There is a distinct lack of public trust in political institutions, and these institutions would be crucial for the management and delivery of any process.

• At both the British and Irish government level there is a sense that relationships are strained.

• In the absence of financial rewards (no public and political support), there are no obvious benefits for current members of paramilitary groups to engage in such a process.

• Community divisions and tensions in Northern Ireland as a result of the Protocol and renewed calls for a Border Poll.

May 2022