Why are armed men still able to parade around Northern Ireland?

Is the Police Service of Northern Ireland equal to the task of dealing with the sour, indigestible remnants of Troubles paramilitarism? Events this weekend in an estate on the outskirts of Derry, showing yet more glorification of a terrorist by armed men firing weapons, suggests otherwise.

Michael Devine, the man who was venerated by half a dozen goons dressed in black this weekend, starved himself to death in Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze prison in 1981 along with nine other republican prisoners in pursuit of political status. He was also a founder of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), one of the most viciously and overtly sectarian paramilitary death squads produced by the Troubles. The Bobby Sands Trust describes this organisation as formed for ‘offensive operational purposes.’ Those offended against were mainly off-duty police and army personnel, judges, ambassadors, MPs and, notoriously, the congregation of an isolated Protestant church in South Armagh. Having tried to murder anyone handy for republican socialism the group then turned the guns on themselves in internecine warfare. Celebrating the contribution of this lot to Irish freedom is like celebrating wasps in August.

You might expect that a UK police force in receipt of intelligence of where and when armed men were going to conduct a propaganda exercise venerating a proscribed terrorist organisation would want to intervene to stop this happening and arrest the perpetrators. But then you would not be looking at law and order through the cracked and cloudy lens of Northern Ireland’s sainted peace process. Despite having foreknowledge of the event, and despite by their own admission having the tactical resources available to respond, the PSNI elected to stay put and conduct an ‘evidence gathering operation’ from a position of near invisibility. The police force has form for this. On a large number of occasions in recent years the funerals of combatants, ranging from child killers to the IRA’s former head of intelligence, have been accompanied by masked men in paramilitary dress, sometimes firing weapons. The police have not intervened in these cases, instead relying on evidence collection after the fact that very rarely leads to prosecution.

After this latest armed stunt the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, was reduced to making a bizarre appeal for people to provide information to the police – who knew about the event but had already failed to act. It seems to me that if armed men were parading around Brandon Lewis’s constituency of Great Yarmouth, the Secretary of State would not have been as relaxed about the situation.

There were reasons for the police to step back: the audience for the INLA’s latest antics was thin on the ground. Their weapons may have been gas powered. One of the ‘soldiers’ apparently left the house wearing his Mum’s red marigolds. The public order impact of large numbers of armed officers stopping this commemoration would have been significant. People might have got hurt if the police were involved. The policing oversight board wouldn’t like it. It’s a big, long list.

By not acting, Northern Ireland’s hapless police chief Simon Byrne, who looks increasingly out of his depth, can then regurgitate the comfortable word salad of a good look around a forensically clean stable after the horse has bolted, or ‘impartially, objectively and effectively’ investigating, as he likes to phrase it. Policing the full fat anarchy of the Troubles has gone. Policing the semi-skimmed peace is proving every bit as fraught.

But the failure of the police to act matters for two reasons. Across Northern Ireland in areas like Galliagh, the embers of violent extremism still burn much brighter than a culture of lawfulness. These are places where indicators of deprivation are and ever were in the basement. They blight loyalist and republican communities and they foster inter-generational grievance. No law-abiding culture can flourish when the state is humiliated by a few goons in Nato knock-offs taking out their inadequacies on their neighbours. While a policing response obviously cannot alone solve these problems, it can send a message to those cowed by paramilitary thugs strutting round a few streets of a council estate with their boots on the necks of decent people, that the glorification of terrorists is a red line that cannot be crossed, whatever the consequences and whatever the ideology.

The second related reason is what US social psychologist Fathali Moghaddam calls, ‘mutual radicalisation’. This is the impact that opposed groups have on each other in their pathological hatred and escalating polarisation. It’s no coincidence that posters have appeared praising Billy Wright, murdered inside the Maze prison by some of Michael Devine’s INLA comrades in 1997. Wright is suspected as the driving force behind the sectarian murders of dozens of innocent Catholics in the mid-Ulster region. The growing perception that the PSNI is more suited to policing pronouns, Pride marches and hurty words than the putrid remnants of paramilitary violence is unlikely to stop this limited but potentially lethal process of radicalisation we are now seeing in areas untouched by any peace dividend. Loyalist communities are mobilising behind a narrative that says their culture is over policed while republicans get away with blue murder.

While it is always easy to criticise the uniquely difficult operational challenges of policing Northern Ireland from a distance, this cannot become a convenient shield for senior police officers and politicians to hide behind. Treating Northern Ireland endlessly as ‘a place apart’ has its dangers too – in terms of law enforcement and dealing with the past. The obsessive relativism of Northern Ireland’s imperfect peace is already a malign house of mirrors. We see victims cast as perpetrators; terrorists cast as human rights advocates. If, added to that, we have a police service and criminal justice system that balks at being seen to take on and take down armed propaganda exercises, we are in a dangerous place.