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LadyEllen -> UK gun control - Northern Ireland (4/10/2008 5:02:23 AM)
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Amazing but short interview last night on TV, with the supposed head of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the largest of the loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland.
Their main enemies, the republican IRA/Sinn Fein were required to prove that their weapons had been decommissioned. The UDA meanwhile have kept theirs, citing the threat from dissident elements of the IRA who have chosen not to take advantage of the peace treaty.
But the leader of the UDA also made another point to support their retaining their weapons. In his view, they can provide more efficient policing of their neighbourhoods than the Police Service of Northern Ireland, in relation to the kind of crime on the UK mainland - drug gangs, prostitution rings, people traffickers et al.
Notwithstanding that groups like the UDA are involved in all elements of crime - the means by which they are funded, it struck me that he likely had a point. I dont believe anyone, however much a hard case they might be, is likely to try anything over there unless they have a penchant for having their kneecaps blown off.
So I got to thinking why he can make such a claim - yes, they have weapons, yes, theyre hardened criminals and murderers themselves, but what they also have is a strong community which enables them and the people under their dubious style of protection, to know who is doing what and who is a stranger in their midst. Its very comparable to the Iraq situation where locals are being hired to provide community security.
On the mainland meanwhile, we have none of this. Our communities are such in name only - most people dont even know their neighbours, let alone the people in the next street. We have no weapons here, aside from those in the hands of serious and organised crime gangs whose only interest is crime. And we have a fluid society in which no one knows anyone, people come and go and no one knows whether someone belongs in a certain place or not - something with which mass immigration from all over the world doesnt help; everyone is deemed suspect and fear runs rampant, inhibiting contact between people still further.
Now no one would suggest that the streets of Belfast is some utopia, but I think they may have retained - through the most awful of mechanisms, something which we have lost - a sense of common unity and identity which I would love to find in my neighbourhood and my town. The problem being though, that they have retained these qualities in Ulster because of the need for them, in order to defend themselves - does it then require an outside threat to produce a coherent identity and unity as a response to it? The experience in Northern Ireland suggests so, as does the experience of WWII from what I've heard of it.
E
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