ANOTHER day, another well publicised attempt to move loyalist paramilitaries away from criminality. The latest episode of BBCNI’s Spotlight programme this week quoted a source as saying that “highly sensitive” talks with the South East Antrim UDA have persuaded mediators of good faith on the part of the gang.

The seemingly indestructible notion/hope on the part of the North’s media that the UDA and the UVF are any minute now about to pack in drug-dealing, pimping, extortion and money-lending and turn to helping old ladies across the road and kittens stuck up trees is yet another example of how determinedly unionist attitudes drive the political narrative here. The idea that men – and they are all men – who have grown up wedded to money-spinning criminality can be somehow moulded into upstanding citizens with a word in their ear and a job in a community centre is one that virtually no-one in the nationalist and republican community buys into. Indeed, so regular are these bouts of concern for the eternal soul of loyal drug barons and pimps that among non-unionists they are a source of wry humour.

There is precisely zero difference between those loyalists who shoot people  dead in front of their children over criminal vendettas and those republicans who once in a blue moon attempt to kill police officers. But the very idea of a newspaper, TV or radio story on a drive to bring the New IRA,  the Real IRA or Óglaigh na hÉireann in from the cold via promises of cushy community jobs is preposterous; it simply wouldn’t happen, and if it did the two main unionist parties would be the first to vent their fury.

But for some reason the UDA and the UVF – who have the heels of their boots on the throats of working class loyalist communities – are endlessly courted and indulged with laughable and totally unserious attempts to make them see sense.

Let us be very clear about this, because there seems to be a problem in recognising the obvious here: neither of these two groups is going to step away from the lucrative thuggery that is their byword. There are myriad reasons for that, but the most obvious is that the groups are not tightly-controlled and disciplined paramilitary forces, but a disparate and unpredictable collection of gangs bound together by a toxic mixture of history, geography and greed.

The gang that is the subject of this latest risible attempt to achieve the unachievable – the South East Antrim UDA – is itself not even a coherent and organised unit, never mind the huge and uncontrollalbe loose collection of variously motivated entities that is the UDA. And if the many micro-constituents of the sprawling loyalist crime syndicate are impossible to control, what chance the umbrella they’re under can be folded away?
Alliance leader Naomi Long hit the nail on the head when she asked if anyone would countenance the enticing of Dublin’s crime gangs into the public square.
Thugs need to be pursued and punished – not reinvented.