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The guns are still packed away, but the threat is there

There has been a flurry of political activity over the past week, most of it generated by the DUP and their unhealthy courting of the Loyalist Communities Council. The LCC's purported aim, whenever it was launched in 2015, with the backing of the UDA, the UVF, the Red Hand Commando and Jonathan Powell, the former chief adviser to Tony Blair, was "reversing the perceived neglect of loyalist working-class communities". It was a good initiative and well-intentioned, but like many other similar schemes it has failed to achieve the objective of ending for good loyalist paramilitary organisations a...

In a piece for the Belfast Telegraph on May 5, 2018, I noted: "The DUP also needs to abandon its present fixation with what Arlene Foster describes as a troublesome Irish government. Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney aren't responsible for the present crisis. Their recent input into our local politics has been caused by two outcomes, neither of which they provoked: the failure of the DUP and SF to cut a deal (to restore the Executive) and the UK's decision to leave the EU. Both of those issues have a direct impact on the Irish government, so it would be quite remarkable if they didn't raise thei...

Irish republican says violence is counter-productive Henry McDonald A leading political voice in Irish dissident republicanism has urged all the armed paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland to call ceasefires and end their violence. Des Dalton, the former president of the ideologically hardline Republican Sinn Féin, has become the first figure to emerge from dissident republican groups to advise those like him opposed to the Good Friday agreement that “armed struggle” should be suspended. His call for a dissident republican ceasefire comes at a time of increasing tension...

The three gruff, burly representatives of Northern Ireland’s infamous loyalist paramilitary organisations — the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association and the Red Hand Commando — met