Short Strand: The anatomy of a sectarian state

John McAnulty

8 July 2011

The facts about the June attacks on Short Strand are unambiguous. "Ugly Doris," the local commander of group of vicious sectarian killers called the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), led almost 100 paramilitaries in an unprovoked attack on the Nationalist ghetto. The initial attack was clearly a military operation, with a co-ordinated attack where the participants wore balaclavas and surgical gloves to avoid leaving forensic evidence. Broader sectarian rioting broke out. Shots were exchanged and two attackers and a press photographer were injured

As so often in the North of Ireland, it in the aftermath that things become obscure. One would have expected outrage from the victims, denunciation by press, politicians, church, state and trade unions - the sort of moral panic that followed the killing of a police constable recently. This would have led to a vigorous police action, possibly leading to UVF leaders who have been released on license being returned to jail, as happened recently to leading republican Marian Price, jailed for holding a speech transcript for a speaker at a republican rally.

Nothing of the sort happened. There was absolute silence from the Short Strand as Sinn Fein imposed a lockdown. The Shinners immediately met in secret with the attackers to search for ways to conciliate them. The press wandered helplessly, interviewing residents outside the ghetto. Local unionist politicians gave thinly veiled sectarian justifications for the attack. The police passively interposed landrovers. None of the UVF attackers were arrested. After a second night of violence the police withdrew and two sets of community activists - one group drawn from Sinn Fein, the other made up mainly of the UVF, oversaw a cessation of the attacks.

First Minister Peter Robinson met the UVF, even though state agencies had determined that the UVF had not fully disarmed and had killed Shankill Road resident Bobby Moffet in May last year. A few days later Irish president Mary McAleese called into Short Strand. The visit was in the way of a consolation prize. She was actually on her way to Loyalist East Belfast to mollify a meeting that included a number of prominent Loyalist paramilitaries. One of the figures, “brigadier” Jackie McDonald, has been is receipt of millions of euros funnelled through the President’s office.

The overall explanation for the violence and subsequent events was that "Ugly Doris" was a loose cannon but that his actions represented deprivation and alienation within loyalism which had to be appeased so that all would move towards a gradual reconciliation.  The more cynical commentators presented it as a "grant application," referring to the large numbers of Loyalist and Republican activists on the state payroll as "community activists".

But the UVF, and loyalism and unionism more generally, are acting in concert to achieve well-defined objectives and are looking for a lot more than money. Rather that the attacks being the work of one individual, they were discussed beforehand within the UVF leadership and senior figures from other areas were present during the attack. One must situate the attack on Short Strand in an ongoing struggle around the Orange marching season and more generally in the ongoing decay and instability within unionism. Attempts to placate Orangeism in 2010 foundered because the Orange lodges would not accept even a notional qualification of their right to intimidate their Catholic neighbours.

Both the Orange and the UVF claim that they are trying to fight poor investment and job creation in loyalist areas and that Stormont, with its Loyalist majority, is “a cold house for loyalism.” This nonsense is part of an undying loyalist plaint, extending to before partition, that Catholics are getting too much of available resources, even though the most deprived areas are overwhelmingly Catholic and unemployment among Catholics runs at twice the rate among their Protestant counterparts, a picture that has not changed over the course of the troubles and the subsequent peace process.  The central core of loyalism, the central element of sectarianism, is to ensure that resources go to Protestants rather than Catholics. In East Belfast this was achieved by retaining the shipyard as an overwhelmingly Protestant preserve.  When the forces of capitalism swept away the shipyards the case for sectarian intimidation as a mechanism for job creation became thinner, but this only whips the bigots to greater frenzy.

The current events began with the annual festival of sectarianism and intimidation in north Belfast known as the "Tour of the North". A "feeder parade" past the nationalist ghetto of Ardoyne, the cause of a 3-day battle last year, was banned by the Parades Commission. The Parades Commission is one of a number of quangos set up to provide a veneer of impartiality as the state fine-tunes sectarian conflict.

The ban led to an immediate riot. The fact that a serving government minister, Nelson McCausland, was at the front of the Orange mob before the riot and justifying the violence afterwards passed without comment.  No-one mentioned the mass chanting of the Orangemen, summing up the blatant intimidation involved:

“We are the Protestant Boys!
Fenians! Pull down your windows and hear us roar!”

A local paper, the Sunday World, then reported that a series of secret meetings had been taking place between the Orange order and the UVF aimed at ensuring that the state backed away from any regulation of the parades. The attack on the Short Strand took place in this context.

The meeting between Peter Robinson and the UVF was followed by a meeting between First Minister Robinson, Deputy Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein and the "Independent" Parades Commission. On the 1st July the commission, having banned the June Ardoyne feeder parade by the Orange order, announced that the bigger and more provocative July demonstration, the cause of last year’s major riots, would be pushed through.

The interpretation of these events should be self-evident. The annual ritual of Orange intimidation, the support of the dark forces of paramilitary reaction, these are built into the fabric of the state. By signing up to the current settlement Sinn Fein has become a guarantor of sectarianism. Last week's lockdown of the Short Strand will now lead inevitably to a greater Sinn Fein role in suppressing nationalist protest in Ardoyne in the immediate future.  In the past the Shinners hid their police role behind a line of their own members staging a token protest.  This is no longer possible and community workers in Short Strand have barred any protest within sight of the interface when the major Orange parade passes.

This is clearly an unstable outcome, but it is forced on the state by its struggle to preserve loyalism even as it decays. Despite the failure of loyalist paramilitaries to attract any substantial support the British have built them into the political settlement from the very beginning, fixing the vote for the initial convention which preceded the current Assembly to ensure that they were represented.

The experiment with the UDA failed early in the process, but the UVF looked like a success story. It had a party, the Progressive Unionist Party, a persuasive leader, David Irvine, who won a place at the Assembly and was succeeded on his death by Dawn Purvis. The UVF was persuaded to decommission its weapons.

Then an opponent of the UVF, Bobby Moffet, was killed on the loyalist Shankill Road. It became evident that the UVF had not disarmed and was not on ceasefire.  Dawn Purvis tried to preserve her base by leaving the PUP and both she and the PUP failed to get elected in the May elections, with the PUP going into sharp decline afterwards. In any case failure of the project was signalled by anodyne "community" murals in East Belfast being replaced by explicit celebration of sectarian intimidation and murder.

What the events of Short Strand tell us is that the political failure of the UVF, their revision to type, will make no difference. As with the UDA earlier, the British state will step in. A steady stream of grants, places on quangos and community bodies, will ensure that the paramilitaries are bolted on to civic society, that an end of sectarianism is not on the agenda, that every decision about the future will consider balancing competing sectarian rights, with the balance tilted towards Loyalism and the threat of violence in the background.

This agenda of “equality of the two traditions” was made explicit by Irish president Mary McAleese at the East Belfast meeting. The goal was to have a normal society where everyone could move freely. The mechanism was to unite communities against hate. Hate was not to be defined. It would tackle sectarianism through putting it on a par with dislike for disabled or old people - a personal attitude rather than a central feature of the state. At the forefront of the battle against attitudes would be community leaders - that is, structures including the reactionaries who disseminate sectarian hatred.

A left version of this tosh is promulgated by Sinn Fein and sections of the trade union movement, who call for support for a political loyalism on the grounds that the protestant working class needs leadership. On that basis the English workers need leadership from the BNP and US transport workers needed the leadership of Jimmy Hoffa. This formula is both a slander on workers from a protestant background and a demonstration of the sectarianism of those making the calls.

The small republican movement opposes the surrender to sectarian intimidation, but counterpoises the unity of “Protestant, Catholic and dissenter” in an Irish democracy. Decades of struggle tell us how unrealistic this is.  A democratic solution would include all the forces promoting sectarianism, including Irish capitalists willing to fight tooth and nail to preserve the present settlement. We clearly need to go beyond a capitalist democracy to promote the unity of workers as a class, around their own demands and programme.

All one has to do to refute the agenda of sectarian equilibrium is to examine East Belfast at the height of its success, when paramilitary murals were replaced by historical narratives of the blitz, the battle of the Somme, the shipyards and Titanic murals.

The murals represented a contradictory process. On the one hand they were an attempt to construct a "Protestant" identity. This was a project that was bound to fail. The divisions in the North of Ireland are political, not cultural or racial. The historical experiences put forward by the loyalists as the foundation of a Protestant identity are common to their Catholic neighbours. Where they are not, sectarian crime is hidden - the celebration of the shipyards hides the mass expulsion of Catholic workers in the aftermath of the First World War.

So the murals fail to construct an alternate identity. They end up as a slightly less violent way of asserting sectarian identity. The message is summed up by a mural placed within 200 metres of the Short Strand. A scene of the Northern Ireland football team framed in loyalist flags bears the inscription: "Our own wee country". Nationalist workers have no difficulty in deciphering the message - our own wee Protestant country, where you live on sufferance.

The project to assimilate loyalism into civil society is an attempt to return to the 1950s. The Orange monster sleeps and society is at peace. However the drug that keeps it asleep is the acceptance by working-class nationalists of a subordinate position. That doesn't last forever. The Orange monster doesn't sleep forever.

Socialists have to lead the fight against sectarianism. The aim of socialists is to unite the working class against capitalism and imperialism, so sectarianism is the antithesis of everything we believe in. We do not seek to balance between factions but to stand against the oppressor. That means that we specifically oppose Loyalism as an ideology that divides the working class, that seeks to oppress Catholics, that attempts to wield a section of the working class to the capitalists, to the state, to imperialism and to a feudal monarchy.

We acknowledge that in a sectarian state it is not sufficient to express moral outrage at sectarian incidents. We have to oppose the state that fosters sectarianism, the Hillsborough agreement on which the state rests, the imperialist force that holds up the rotten structure and the vast majority of political and trade union leaders who unreservedly support its continuation.

As with so many other things under modern capitalism, there are no reformist solutions. Sectarianism can only be defeated by a new all-Ireland revolutionary party of the working class, built through its conscious battle against all the forces that seek to oppress, exploit and divide us.

The task is urgent. The initial attack on Short Strand was by paramilitaries who are still led by members of the death squads. The more generalised sectarian attack which followed involved youths of 16 and younger, who weren't born when the current peace process began. And this sectarian renewal is occurring before a period of unrivalled austerity that will provide a breeding ground for new levels of sectarian rivalry.

The sectarian state is reproducing itself before our eyes. Not only is the small Irish socialist movement unable to strike back, the majority of socialists don't even recognize the enemy.

In tales of magic, power comes from knowing the true names of objects. Let us look beyond the individual sectarian and know the name of our enemies.