Debate contribution: Paramilitary Groups: Transition from Violence and Crime

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 10 March 2025.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

10 March 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Paramilitary Groups: Transition from Violence and Crime

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4841615

Read the official Assembly record

Text

It sometimes feels that this place is not progressing at all. It can feel a bit bewildering and head-scratching at times for people who are watching from the outside when they are told that armed paramilitary gangs continue to exist and that many of those armed paramilitary gangs are not engaged in active, as it were, political violence, but retain arms either to be armed for some hypothetical future political violence that they wish to wage or because it enables them to protect financial or criminal interests that they are pursuing, up to and including inflicting misery on communities, dealing drugs, extortion, loan-sharking, violence and all the unbelievably appalling things that have been listed. I was away from here for 20 years. I have been back for five years. Like lots of other people who go away and come back, I am a bit baffled that we are still in a situation where we recycle the same frustrations again and again about the existence of these organisations, but things never seem to move on. I think things do move on, slowly, but it is clear that the continued pernicious presence of paramilitaries in our society is something that is a profound stain on society. It is one of the most intense manifestations of how abnormal, unreconciled and divided this society is. We cannot simply tolerate it.

I will touch on a few points that have been made and make a few points of my own. We have broad sympathy with the Alliance Party motion and will support it with caveats. We submitted amendments that would have put our phraseology and context into the motion. It is true that the paramilitaries have their feet on the necks of working-class communities in particular. I represent working-class communities in which coercive control is still exercised by people who reserve the right to say when flags go up and when they come down and demand the right to say what type of housing goes where and what colour of people live where and all the rest of it. It may be that, on other days, some of those people go to meetings, avail themselves of public funding and play the game, saying, "Aren't I a great fella? I'm doing my best. It's the other fellas that you need to watch". That is abnormal. Nevertheless, it is true to say that the Executive fund it and have been funding it for basically the entire existence of the institutions. Doug Beattie mentioned the Communities in Transition project, of which it is true to say that the Department of Justice is a stakeholder. It is also true to say that, as was the case with her predecessor, it is within the Justice Minister's power and that of her Department to look at criminal justice reform and create new offences that could lead to more prosecutions. As her predecessor could have done, she could create new and tightened sentencing regimes for such crimes. Some of that has been looked at as part of the tackling paramilitarism programme. Sometimes we express our outrage and anger at what London and Dublin are doing when it would be better for us to look internally at what is happening in these institutions. Some of what has been said today about some of what has happened in these institutions is exactly right. With regard to what the UK and Irish Governments are doing, it is important that we recognise that they will probably do it anyway, no matter what happens in the Chamber. That is a harsh, blunt reality. It is pretty shocking that they will go on and engage with paramilitaries and probably seek some mechanism to prolong those conversations because they deem it to be in their interests. The interests of the people of Northern Ireland are in those organisations getting off the stage and going away, and how we go about getting them to do that is, I am afraid, muddied by the fact that a huge amount of obfuscation, double-talk and, frankly, gaslighting goes on among parties in this place and, at times, in both Governments. We will support the motion so far as it goes. I am sympathetic to some of what is in the amendments, but there are a lot of things that the SDLP would have phrased slightly differently. The most important thing is for those organisations to no longer exist and no longer feel that they have the right to impose their will on the public discourse. The fact that Ministers still meet the Loyalist Communities Council has been mentioned: what gives those people the right to feel that they can dictate the pace of debate in this society in 2025 or sue elected representatives when they wish to make their views known? All those things —

— are not conducive to a normal, healthy, democratic society. We need to move on. We support the motion, but we also call for more nuanced debate —

— on how these things go forward.

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

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:06 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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