So, I watched some news on TV here for the first time today, and one of the stories was this. For those who don’t want to click the link: a teenager was murdered in Northern Ireland by “a loyalist gang”. It’s being refered to as “sectarian violence”.
The news seems to be fairly cautious about it, but no one seems shocked at the fact that it was (allegedly) politically motivated. Everyone is ‘shocked and saddened’ of course; the kid was 15. So that makes me think that it’s not entirely uncommon, for political loyalties to be the motivation in violent crime.
What’s the dope? I was under the impression that by the early 90’s, at the latest, people had pretty much laid down arms and given up on the pipe bombs, and accepted the Republic of/Northern Ireland boundries that are. Then, this. How uncommon is it?
“Early '90s” would certainly be overoptimistic. The Good Friday Agreement wasn’t signed until 1998.
Paramilitary violence has continued. Much of it is intramural (especially among Protestant/Loyalist gangs).
A few bits of context:
The political paramilitaries were very “effective” at a grassroots/street level. The lessening of the overt political/military standoff has not necessarily translated into a lessening of the street-level-enforcer culture.
N. Ireland is IME very, well, provincial in some senses. People seem to identify very strongly with their city/neighborhood/housing estate. Esp. during the Troubles, it was not a good idea to enter a strange area of town. A lot of what seems to be going on here is wrong-place/wrong-time interactions when someone inadvertently or otherwise wanders into someone else’s turf.
Many of the paramilitaries financed their activities through petty or other criminality (or so it was alleged). When the Troubles faded, the profits to be made from, say, cigarette smuggling or drug trafficking (things the Loyalists and Nationalists have both been accused of) did not, nor did the need to have tough guys on the street to run those businesses.
Yes out-and-out sectarian violence, between paramilitaries in one community and members of another is now very rare. There is still a great deal of ill-will between the communities (in many areas) which may have resulted in this incident (i.e. just thugs picking on a kid because he was catholic in the wrong place, rather than an organised para-military killing).
Also other kinds of paramilitary violence are still fairly common, in particular “punishment” attacks within the community (for crimes like drug dealing, or rather drug dealing with the authorisation of the relevant paramilitary group), and internicean (sp?) feuds between different protestant paramilitary factions.
But, Huerta88, there’s a big difference between purely sectarian murder and other forms of paramilitary activity.
Sectarian killing in NI has always been more tribal than political. It selected victims purely by dint of their social/religious upbringing, and a lot of it was tit-for-tat revenge - Unionist is murdered, so kill a Nationalist; in revenge, kill a Unionist; et bloody c. I hope, though am not convinced, that the paramilitary leaders didn’t command it.
Yes, it was still happening in the 1990s, but the 1980s were the worst. The shock is that it happened today, so long after the last one (this refers to “the last one that the police identified as being sectarian” - there may have been other ones that were in fact sectarian, but not identified as such).
I truly hope it’s an isolated incident, and isn’t reciprocated.
Much of the ‘punishment beating’ stuff is plain old gang violence, under a thin veneer of paramilitarilism. As griffin1977 says, it’s often simply about controlling the drug market, or also other things such as fuel smuggling.
So, in other words, although these groups started on political issues, now they’re not much different than the gangs you see in any major American city. Is that correct?
Its a bit more complex than that. They are all involved in politics (the protestant groups less than the catholic ones but they still have political wings with elected representives). Even the most fringe sectarian splinter group is more organised (in not nessacarily and more principled) that the most sophisticated street gang.
Oh I believe it has one (another VBulletin board I use has one) but it is considered wiser to keep it disabled. A lot of the time it might not matter, but the thinking is that a thread wich was moving fast and with strong opinions bandied about could quickly become a terrible mess if people felt moved to edit their posts in a way that rendered exisiting replies to that post to appear completely deranged and nonsensical.
In the US context, if you were to think of it as the Bloods Vs Crips after each had spent a lot of time absorbing the midset and organisation of the Militia movement you’d probably not be too far off the mark.
While we’re here - can anyone recommend a decent book or two on the general topic (eg, the whole protestant-unionist v. catholics thing), especially a more modern one (say, WWII forward or so?)
All this reminds me of the Communist and Fascist gangs in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis rose to power in large part on the strength of their respective gang, the Brownshirts, and one of the Nazi movement’s early heroes, Horst Wessel, was a pimp who got shot to death.
):