Sunday Business Post11 November 2007
Despite the peace process, loyalist areas remain in the stranglehold of the UDA and its drug gangs, writes Colm Heatley in Belfast.Tigers Bay, a once-bustling community in north Belfast, is filled with row after row of derelict houses. Last week, the staunchly loyalist area was burying its latest victim of suicide, the seventh individual to take his own life in the district over the past few years.
Dean Clarke, 16, was buried on Wednesday, amid allegations that drug dealers in Tigers Bay and other loyalist areas are senior Ulster Defence Association (UDA) members who are being protected by the police because they are informers.
The allegations came not only from Clarke’s family, but also from senior Protestant clergymen in north Belfast, who are normally reticent to speak out on such matters. While the political progress at Stormont has taken centre stage in recent months, little headway has been made in communities such as Tigers Bay.
Clarke hanged himself close to his house last Saturday, days after taking ketamine, a form of horse tranquiliser, which was sold to him by an alleged UDA drug dealer for 40p. He was feeling suicidal after taking the drug and his mother, Alison, took him to the Mater Hospital for treatment. He was sent home.
The boarded-up houses lining Tiger Bay, many built in the 1980s, were vacated as people left because of deprivation and the stranglehold the UDA exerts in the area. Others, often whole families and generations of families, were forced out at gunpoint because a family member had fallen foul of the UDA.
In Tigers Bay last week, there was a groundswell of anger against the UDA. Local residents and clergymen were asking why the group was being allowed to continue its drug-dealing and criminality.
‘‘My son was killed by drugs, and no one is doing anything about it,” said Alison Clarke. ‘‘When I went to where he was lying, they wouldn’t let me see him. It was terrible, he was brain dead. I don’t know what to say.”
Robert Beckett, a local evangelical minister, said people in Tigers Bay were afraid because the dealers were ‘‘untouchable’’. He added that he shared the suspicion that the police were protecting the drug dealers. The police have denied the allegations.
Five men were arrested on Thursday by police carrying out a planned search of houses in the Tigers Bay area. The men were taken into police custody for questioning, but were later released without charge pending reports to the Public Prosecution Service.
However, the locals have their suspicions. Last year, a report by the Police Ombudsman revealed that the Special Branch had been running an Ulster Volunteer Force killer gang in the Mount Vernon estate, half a mile from Tigers Bay.
Suspicions of police collusion with loyalists have now spread to the working-class Protestant communities where the UDA and UVF live. Tigers Bay is next to the republican New Lodge district and, until just a few years ago, sectarian rioting was a daily occurrence, with sirens set up by nationalists to warn of fresh trouble.
But, despite the progress made by the peace process, there is little for young people, nationalist or loyalist, to do in lower north Belfast. The local play area, Alexandra Park, which backs onto Tigers Bay, is divided by a 12 foot high ‘‘peace wall’’.
Davy McClean, a Christian youth worker in Tigers Bay, has the ear of young people in the area. A former skinhead who spent a ‘‘fair bit of time rioting’’ in his youth, McClean was adamant that the drug dealers were part of the UDA and were being protected by police.
‘‘The whole community is against them, no one wants drugs here, and there is no doubt that the UDA knows exactly what is going on,” he said. ‘‘If there is anything going on, the UDA knows all about it, and the UDA brigadier knows all about the drug-dealing but chooses not to stop it. There is too much money being made.”
McClean said that drugs were available ‘‘24-7’’ in the area. ‘‘There is a bar where people go just to buy drugs. Houses are open all night long. Cocaine here is the cheapest in Northern Ireland. The ketamine which young Dean took is dipped in blue powder and sold as ‘‘loyalist blues’’. You can buy dozens of wraps of it for stg£20.
‘‘I’ve lived here all my life, and it has got worse as the years have gone on. These past few years have been the worst, with the UDA feuds. They say they are here to protect the area - but they are here to take what they can from it.”
Such views, while widely held in loyalist districts, are seldom aired in public. The identity of the UDA ‘brigadier’ who runs the organisation in north Belfast, is well known. In his late 30s, he was kneecapped by the UDA in 2001 for stealing money from the organisation.
But despite that, and because of a series of subsequent bloody feuds, he is now one of its most senior members. He drinks in the loyalist bars around Tigers Bay, but his home is a large house a few miles up the road in an affluent area of Co Antrim.
It is men such as this that the British and Irish governments hope to coax away from crime, with offers of government funding and further talks about the future of the UDA.
When the North’s social development minister, Margaret Ritchie, prevented stg£1.2million in funding going to the UDA last month, she was threatened with legal action by Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the DUP and finance minister in the North.
The US and British governments were also opposed to Ritchie’s decision. While most cities have criminal gangs, few have such an effect on the political process as the UDA. The group has no political mandate, and doesn’t contest elections since its political wing, the Ulster Democratic Party, was wound up a few years ago.
Just a few yards from where Dean Clarke took his own life, an old factory is being converted into fashionable loft-style apartments, a sign of a new and vibrant Belfast. But until the gangs are tackled, the reality in the backstreets of the city won’t change very much.
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