General

“Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State” by Uĝur Ümit Üngör (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Reviewed by Chris Stanley. The genesis for this book was an analysis of Assad of Syria’s unleashing of militias to repress an uprising against his regime in 2011. Upon reflection the author realised that that violent episode deserved a monograph in its own right. But the Syrian episode provides a prism through which Uĝur Ümit Üngör compellingly considers paramilitarism, violence and the state. He uses the metaphor of the solar eclipse to reveal the dark heat of the relationship between state and paramilitarism (page 186).  Üngör opens with the recent and continuing Syrian ‘experience’ of violent conflict reliant upon the paramilitary militias. Episodes of insurgency and counter-insurgency can be painfully drawn out over years, as those in Northern Ireland are all too sadly aware. And this aspect of paramilitarism is possibly more important than Üngör realises.  Today in Northern Ireland there continue to be the entrails of violent paramilitary activity by Republican dissidents set against the peace process. This activity relies upon political and economic disenfranchisement largely among the young and led to the murder in 2019 of the journalist Lyra McKee in Derry. But the structure and activities of these Republican dissients paramilitary groups are vastly different to those of the PIRA and INLA at the height of the Conflict.  Also today in Northern Ireland the remnants of Loyalist paramilitary exists in the form of low-level violent gangsterism and criminality. Üngör has a sound understanding of the relationship between paramilitarism and criminality.  The shadow of paramilitarism still looms as a presence in Northern Ireland; its force still to be understood through the continued contested out-workings of the Legacy of the Conflict and the relations between the British state and Loyalist and Republican paramilitarism through the policies and practices of collusion, most recently explored by Mark McGovern in ‘Counterinsurgency and Colllusion in Northern Ireland’ (London: Pluto Press, 2019). But what is paramilitarism? Üngör conceptualizes it as “a system in which a state has a relationship with irregular armed organisations that carry out violence. But what is paramilitarism? Üngör conceptualizes it as “a system in which a state has a relationship with irregular armed organisations that carry out violence. These armed groups have different forms and types of relationship with the state, but nevertheless are linked to it” (page 7).  By having a link to the state these organisations achieve a quasi-legitimacy (even if for many it is deniable) – unlike militias. By having a link to the state these organisations achieve a quasi-legitimacy (even if for many it is deniable). There is both a dynamic and a relational proximity between paramilitary groups and the state (page 8) which sets them aside from militias which might have a more dominant role in a failing state or a state which is ceasing to exist or coming into existence. Hence the importance of the organic nature of this relationship.  PIRA was terrorist because it was anti-state (despite collusion between it and aspects of the British security forces, characterised by the role of PIRA-informer Freddie Scappaticci aka Stakeknife) whilst the UDA/UVF/UFF grouping was paramilitary because of direct links between elements within the UDR and the RUC In a counter-insurgency situation such as the Conflict in Northern Ireland, the PIRA was terrorist because it was anti-state (despite collusion between it and aspects of the Britsih security forces, characterised by the role of PIRA-informer Freddie Scappaticci aka Stakeknife) whilst the UDA/UVF/UFF grouping was paramilitary because of direct links between elements within the UDR and the RUC, the latter providing intelligence, personnel and equipment – most notoriously in the Dublin-Monagham Bombings in 1974 which former British Army Military Intelligence Officer (MIO) Fred Holroyd described as the closest point Britain came to invading Ireland in the post-war period.  The UDA was more than tolerated by the British state; it was indeed relied upon because it was outside a legitimate (and therefore accountable-deniable) structure The UDA was more than tolerated by the British state; it was indeed relied upon because it was outside a legitimate (and therefore accountable-deniable) structure (page 11). The UDA was manageable for a period but as with similar organisations described by Üngör (page 15) its value to the state was determined by political-security need and with the Good Friday Peace Agreement 1998 its work for the state was done.  Thus it fragmented into its present form of low-level Loyalist gangsterism mirrored by fragmented dissident Republicanism.   Üngör’s book starts with a loose history or survey – necessarily so given the shadowy nature of his subject – of paramilitarism. He traces its development from militias in emerging modern states and their role in supporting those seeking or claiming territorial rights. The paramilitary subaltern can well be imagined in the Machiavellian world of The Prince. It is in the twentieth century that what might be described as modern paramilitarism emerges, as state authority becomes more settled. The role of the state evolves to protecting its ideological values and countering attempts at insurgency. Regarding Northern Ireland, Üngör considers three heads. First, the security dilemma between identity communities (the sectarian divide). Second, collusion. Third, criminal infighting ‘after the war’. It is welcome that Üngör recognises the centrality of collusion to the Conflict in Northern Ireland – collusion which is still being exposed and contested – as it goes to state impunity for  ‘political’ violence.  I suggest Üngör is wrong in describing the Conflict as ‘war’.  It was a counterinsurgency for the British state and struggle for equality and British withdrawal for Republicans However, I suggest Üngör is wrong in describing the Conflict as ‘war’. Whereas the Conflict has been described as the “Irish War” or “The Dirty War” in fact the Conflict was never designated as either a war or an internal armed conflict as such designations would have invoked the Geneva Conventions. It was a counter-insurgency exercise for the British state and a Republican struggle for equality and the forced withdrawal of the British. Üngör

An Outsider’s view  of always present, now boiling, racism in Ireland By David Langwallner  Hugo Hamilton wrote a book called ‘The Speckled People’ (2003) which to some extent mirrored my experience in growing up with a Germanic mother and a Gaeilgeoir Irish father who refused to allow him to speak English. “Speckled, ‘half and half…Irish on top and German below’”. I was raised largely in Dublin, half Austrian. My school days in a minor school were blighted by Nazi remarks: “go back to Germany Hitler” in the school yard from kids who are now our envied establishment: police or civil servants, or indeed family or criminal lawyers. Austria, I knew, was the country of Mozart,  Schubert, Haydn and Strauss, and Egon Schiele: they did not understand or care when they spied a vehicle for their bullying. They instinctively knew to search for something to which there could be no comeback, to something innate I could do nothing about. It was a huge struggle to survive that and I did so through academic achievement which diminished the bullying somewhat. Like many who have been tormented I also developed the facility with the spoken word which has stood me in good stead. In fact I over-compensated, though I say so myself, with a certain loquaciousness in desperation to gain an acceptance never willingly forthcoming.  When I eventually went to Trinity College in Dublin there was an initial sense of release but there was always an element of bullying and my relationship with the Trinity Law Faculty then and now was terrible, particularly since the importation of academics from UCD. There are far too many little Irelanders in positions of institutional responsibility in Trinity and certain extremists of a fundamentalist nature. Insidious. For them I was neither fish nor fowl. Guinness with blackcurrant. Half-caste, speckled. I remember in the Irish Observer Mace for Trinity an international debate competition I subsequently won I  was undermined with a choice racist comment which drew great guffaws of laughter from the mobocracy of UCD’s premier debating society the L and H: Nein Danke, Herr Langwallner.  I have always considered UCD a breeding ground for corporate criminals and social glibness and the two go hand in glove.  Have you ever gone to the Gaeltacht or a session of traditional Irish music, a UCD-spawned non-entity senior counsel with a Gaelgeoir name asked me a few years ago? Well why should that matter? UCD’s law faculty spawned Sutherland, Cowen, McDowell, Paul Gallagher: all agents of the globalised neo-liberal establishment. But also a disproportionate number of jailbirds such as solicitor Thomas Byrne and ‘Cocaine Jim’ who robbed his own bank.  At times the difference seems to me to be missable. Having studied and worked in the UK and America I am now confirmedly multicultural and non-racist. In effect I am a mongrel, so my antennae are always raised about racist biases and evaluations. I think my worldview constitutes the acquisition of empathy through bitter personal experience. I escaped Ireland’s adolescent universities and enjoyed a time in better colleges in the US and the UK. Harvard is a multi-cultural and mixed-race community and the LSE is immersed in heterogeneous London.  They were models of cosmopolitan tolerance. I might add that interaction with the protestant Brahmin community in Harvard was also a slightly odd experience. I felt not unlike the way Woody Allen imagines himself turning into a caricature Jew at a protestant thanksgiving in Annie Hall. I suspect that is why I got on so well with the legendary Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Criminal Law at Harvard, like Allen a secular Jew, who has represented the likes of Assange, Tyson, OJ Simpson, and Epstein. Outsiders. The recently departed Gunter Grass wrote many novels and was a vigorous political polemicist and  a German national figure. He is most famous for his novel ‘The Tin Drum’(1959).  Its premise is that Oscar, a severely mentally handicapped child or child adult, sees everything that is going on at the onset of fascism in Germany; and reacts by banging a tin drum. It is the perspective of the outsider, the clown observant, the not-to-be-taken-seriously, the boy who cried wolf. The person suffering from a disability. He cannot be seen as a threat. Like a lot of autistic people and those suffering from Aspergers, of which I have had considerable professional experience, he is inclined to tell the truth or call it as he sees it. His mind is unfiltered by bourgeois hypocrisy. When the lunatics have taken over the asylum they designate the truth-teller as mad.  So yes, I have always been an outsider: precarious but at  least equipped with an objectivity. It was always going to be dangerous to return to Ireland thirty years ago and deploy a faux cosmopolitanism or vicarious celebrity that local parochialism and the parish pump of Ireland do not accept or endorse. And so, ill-equipped, I practised and lectured law in Ireland. I became dean of Griffith College’s law department and lectured for years in the King’s Inns. My role in establishing The Irish Innocence Project, which seeks to get innocent prisoners off death row, gradually led to moves against me and frankly attempted state murder. Some of the spectres of my minor school now in positions of institutional authority came back to haunt, for racism in fact is very much on the ascendant in Ireland. Certainly the more public you become. I should of course state that the level of racism I have encountered is not equivalent to that often suffered by people of colour. More generally, a very recent EU Survey from its Fundamental Rights Agency confirmed that Ireland has a particular problem. In Ireland 17 per cent of immigrants said they had faced discrimination at work because of their background, whereas on average in the EU less than one in 10 had. 38 per cent said they had been harassed, though in the EU it was less than a quarter. In Ireland, 8 per cent had had suffered racist violence compared to 3 per cent in the EU. In Ireland in 2020 we