Jackie McDonald, the influential south Belfast Ulster Defence Association leader, listened recently to former Alliance leader John Alderdice’s complaints that loyalist paramilitaries have not gone away, and will not do so.
“Lord Alderdice says nothing is happening, but you don’t know the hard work that goes into making nothing happen,” says McDonald in community offices in the Taughmonagh estate in south Belfast.
McDonald’s line about Alderdice is sharp. In a world where few agree on much, there is general agreement that whatever about other loyalist leaders McDonald has put in the hard yards in his own terrain to maintain discipline and order.
The plan by the Irish and British governments to appoint an interlocutor to establish whether loyalist paramilitaries, and republican dissidents, can be persuaded to fade away is “a good thing”, he says.
RM Block
However, he opposes the central aim of the idea first put forward by the Independent Reporting Commission of disbandment: to bring about the disbandment of all paramilitary organisations.
Such a course makes no sense, says McDonald, who has been involved in the Ulster Defence Association since the early 1970s. “For loyalist paramilitaries to go away would leave a void that would be filled within minutes,” he says.
“If the UVF, the UDA, the Red Hand Commando, whatever, were to say, ‘We’re leaving the stage at 12 o’clock tonight’, at 12.05 there’d be the new UDA, or another version of the UVF or Red Hand.”
Criminal elements would “fill that void”, though in the view of many observers in Northern Ireland large elements of loyalist paramilitarism have long been involved in drug-dealing, prostitution and extortion.
“There’s no paramilitary activity here, but there’s paramilitary influence.” And that, he believes, is needed.
“The drug dealers and the criminals have to know that it’s there, that you can’t mess about, that the community comes first. The same exists in republican areas.”
McDonald has managed to keep the south Belfast UDA people “fairly sensible and steady”, in the words of one
He also argues that the threat posed by dissident republicans still offers reasons why loyalist paramilitaries cannot quit the stage.
Union flags fly proudly outside the Taughmonagh offices – one visited by his long-time friend and former president of Ireland Mary McAleese and her husband, Martin. Everything looks ready for this Twelfth of July weekend.
This and other parts of south Belfast such as Sandy Row and the Village area have been McDonald’s bailiwick for decades. He joined the UDA in July 1972, immediately after the Bloody Friday bombings in the city, when the Provisional IRA exploded at least 20 bombs in Belfast, killing nine and injuring more than 130.
“Bloody Sunday or internment did it for young republicans, Bloody Friday did it for me,” says McDonald.
He rose steadily, ending up as one of the UDA’s six brigadiers, his turf south Belfast. He will be 78 next month, but is still in great shape, five weekly visits to the gym keeping him energetic and trim.
McDonald has a reputation as “a hard man”, but one many politicians and officials believe they can do business with. When Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair’s reign caused mayhem in the Lower Shankill, it was McDonald who brought him to heel, forcing him to flee to Scotland in 2003. In the years since, McDonald has managed to keep the south Belfast UDA people “fairly sensible and steady”, in the words of one, including during the internecine loyalist feuds that have flared from time to time.
Throughout, McDonald insists that he is speaking only for his own patch, but accepts that he knows of the charges made linking loyalists to criminality of all hues. However, he will not comment.
“I hear the same stories, but I don’t get involved. We’re still very close with our colleagues. I don’t know who’s doing what, or if the allegations are true, or if the allegations are exaggerated.”
Drug dealing happens in south Belfast, like elsewhere, but his members are not involved, he says. “It’s not about being a community worker by day and a terrorist or a paramilitary by night. It’s nothing like that here,” he says while acknowledging that “unfortunately” that is not the case everywhere. He refers with disdain to those whose lifestyle is one of “Rolexes, 4x4s and three holidays a year”.
More than a decade ago, he told loyalists gathered on Remembrance Sunday on Sandy Row: “There’s no such thing as a loyalist drug dealer. If you’re a loyalist, you wouldn’t want to be a drug dealer, and if you’re a drug dealer, you can’t be a loyalist.”
Favouring a quasi-local policing role for paramilitaries, he sees no contradiction in arguing for tougher action by the courts and police against drug dealers and other forms of criminality.
“People get caught and they get a slap on the wrist, they get suspended sentences. If you’re a young adult caught selling drugs at this time of year, you say to yourself, ‘I’ll not be in court now until about October/November. The winter’s coming. The cold nights are coming. I do three months, or I do six months over the winter, and I won’t have to worry about paying for the heat or electric or anything.’ This is the way they think.”
Too many young loyalists “think they missed out on the conflict”, he says. “They’re saying, ‘We’ll not be told what to do by grey-haired old men. We’ll do a better job than you.’ A better job on who?
“Republicans are not a physical threat any more. It’s the drug dealers are a threat. But some of them want to build up some sort of notoriety, get themselves a reputation. They get involved in protests and if it’s about flags, about immigration, about any protest at all, it always ends up with the police getting hammered. And that takes away from everything. That makes us all look like Neanderthals, it doesn’t do the reputation of loyalism any good at all.”
A 40-minute drive west from Taughmonagh is Moygashel, the centre of controversy this week when loyalists placed effigies of migrants in a boat on a bonfire with anti-immigration banners. It came as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism organisation, published a new report showing anti-migrant far-right figures in the Republic are increasing their co-operation with loyalist groups in Northern Ireland. The report said such groups were entering a “more organised phase”.
Asked about last month’s rioting in Ballymena, McDonald said he was “totally against” the street violence that erupted after two Romanian-speaking teenagers were charged with the attempted rape and sexual assault of a teenage girl.
However, he says a “tipping point” on immigration has been reached, with many people having genuine concerns. “There is a feeling that these people are getting priority and preference over some of our people.”
McDonald admits his paramilitary past, including a 1989 racketeering sentence. “I got 10 years for extortion, yeah, but that was to buy guns, to look after prisoners’ families, to buy explosives. It was something that I hated doing.
“I’d been doing all sorts of things for many, many years, and I got away with it, but I knew that getting involved in that sort of thing was going to get me 10 years, and it did. But now we don’t need the criminality.
“We don’t need to buy guns any more. We haven’t got prisoners any more. What’s the money for? Where does the money go?” says McDonald, who acknowledges the record of loyalist paramilitaries carrying out sectarian killings during The Troubles.
“On many occasions that was true.” But republican paramilitaries must own their sins, too: “I’ve had this argument with IRA members. They’d say they were fighting for ‘Brits out’. There were at least 50,000 people in uniform here, between the British army, the RUC, prison officers, etc.
“Fifty-thousand uniforms and the IRA still planted bombs on the Shankill Road and in the pubs and the clubs and in the Sandy Row. What was that? That was to terrorise the people. That was pure sectarianism.”
Mary changed things for us. The politicians didn’t want to know us. Mary played a vital role. She is a great woman
— McDonald on Mary McAleese
Faced with talk of Irish unity and Sinn Féin successes, McDonald emphasises that unionist politicians and loyalists must unite, although complaining how little the former has ever delivered for the latter.
“Unionists are in the castle. When they see us loyalists coming, they lift up the drawbridge. They’ll say, ‘You can stay out there and we’ll look after you and we’ll feed you and so on but you’re not getting in here’.”
That must change, especially since “Britain would dump us in the morning”: “I want unionism to be united. The word loyalist is always followed by some derogatory word, and it shouldn’t be like that.
“Somehow, we have to get unionism united and get genuine loyalists into a position where they can close that gap between unionism and loyalism. But we have to widen the gap between genuine loyalism and criminality. That’s the key.”
A united Ireland will not happen in his lifetime, he believes. But if it were ever to happen, he asks:” Where would the Orange Order go? Where would the 30,000 bandsmen go? Where would ex-loyalist prisoners go?
“Are we going to be like the Apaches or the Indians put away in a reservation somewhere?” asks McDonald, who has a good working relationship with senior republicans across Belfast, and elsewhere.
During tense periods – and this weekend is one – a network of republican-loyalist contacts – largely unrecognised and unnoticed – defuse many volatile situations.
Though he lost friends during the Troubles, he displays no bitterness. Recalling a conversation with former IRA prisoner Sean “Spike” Murray, he noted how Murray said they “probably would have tried to kill each other” in the past, but now they can even share car lifts.
For a number of years, former loyalist and republican paramilitaries visited schools to talk about the real cost of the conflict, the coffins of fathers and sons carried, the pain, not the imagined past of heroic actions. “We wanted to deromanticise paramilitarism.
“’Do you want to go to prison?’ we told them, ‘Your life’s ruined. When you come out your wife’s divorced you and married somebody else and has children with somebody else.’ I think we did a great job of deglamourising paramilitarism.”
Today, McDonald keeps in touch with the McAleeses. “Mary changed things for us,” he says. “The politicians didn’t want to know us. The police wanted to arrest us. She made it easier for politicians up here to talk to us. Mary played a vital role. She is a great woman.”
McDonald has no notion of stepping down. “It wouldn’t matter what plans I had, people are telling me, ‘You are not retiring.’ I want to keep going as long as I can.”
