Debate contribution: Tackling Paramilitarism

Debate contribution by Mr Peter McReynolds on 15 October 2024.

MLA

Mr Peter McReynolds

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

15 October 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Tackling Paramilitarism

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4592572

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Over the weekend, I was reflecting on what to say on the motion, and I remembered how, a number of years ago, when I was a deputy lord mayor, I was invited to give a welcome speech at a mental health conference that was taking place in Belfast. It was running all day, but I asked if I could stay on after the welcome to hear some of the speakers before making my apologies. One of the speakers used a phrase that, I feel, I now use on a weekly basis and that the leader of the Opposition used: in Northern Ireland, we have "normalised the abnormal." We educate our young people separately at an enormous cost — parental demand for that is higher than ever — and progress has been slow since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. We all know the importance of this place and the doors that a functioning Assembly can unlock for key policy decisions, but, for five of the past seven years, we have not had Ministers in post to make key decisions like those on the issues at Lough Neagh. I was in briefings on that last year, when civil servants knew the problems and the solutions but, without a Minister in post, were powerless to do anything about them, which delayed our ability to intervene. Thankfully, our AERA Minister is taking steps to address those issues today. We come to the crux of today's motion, and it stuns me to even say these words out loud, but we have the:

"continued attempts by groups linked to paramilitary organisations to influence policy decisions"

and the recent meetings of not one Minister but two. I appreciate that there are only so many hours in a day and that our Ministers have long days, with multiple competing interests. However, it is only since becoming an MLA that I truly appreciate the importance of the Chamber and the opportunity to ask questions of Ministers on the issues that matter to me and to my constituents. If there is an issue, I will take that rare opportunity, if afforded one during the weekly ballot, to plant a seed or an idea in a Minister's head in the hope that, some day, it will bear fruit for the benefit of my constituents or for the issue. We can all sit now and argue that the meetings brought groups along, gently coaxed them away from illegality and will not dictate to Ministers, but representatives of groups that the Home Office has proscribed as terrorist organisations are in a room with the people who can make society-changing decisions at the expense of the legal organisations that represent the hard-working, disadvantaged and moral groups in all our communities. I am an East Belfast MLA. We have our issues in East Belfast, with shows of strength from groups brought in from across Northern Ireland; drug dealing; coercive control; people being made homeless by paramilitaries; coercive murals, which a councillor from another party once described to me as more akin to street art in 2024; and violent murders. Our constituency office on the Newtownards Road deals with the impacts of paramilitarism. That was evident a few years ago when paramilitary groups preyed on food banks to take advantage of vulnerable individuals and their communities — the same communities, we are now told, that they care about. Lastly, we have one of the most attacked and threatened sports clubs on these islands: East Belfast GAA. It is a positive, welcoming and inclusive club that has received threat after threat. That not only disrupts the club but impacts on our Police Service, disrupts the local community and impacts on children. It is my understanding that the Communities Minister has still not fulfilled the club's request to meet following the last hoax incident. We are now in 2024, which, as we heard today, is 26 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. It was never meant to be plain sailing or without bumps in the road. However, groups representing paramilitaries having a seat in the room with Ministers at their request is stunning, and the defence that I have seen of it and heard in the media in recent days is even more so. Those groups destroy lives and hold Northern Ireland back, and they belong in the dustbin as relics of our troubled past. I want to normalise the normal here and have a society that is free from paramilitary control, built on reconciliation and based on making this place work for everyone. That includes working alongside all of you in the Chamber today. We must all be strong and united in our condemnation of the continued existence of those criminal gangs, and I hope that the motion passes unanimously.

800 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:26 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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