Red faces for ‘peace’ group funders

By Suzanne Breen (for the Belfast Telegraph)

A widely hailed loyalist ‘peacemaker’ is convicted of possessing guns and ammunition. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

Every line of the Winkie Irvine story is bizarre, and it’s an utterly damning indictment of what passes for normal in Northern Ireland.

The loyalist was arrested by the PSNI’s Terrorism Investigation Unit which had been tracking him in the wake of a hoax bomb alert targeting then Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney as he addressed a peace event in Ardoyne in March 2022.

Irvine’s first court appearance for the arms charges three months later meant he missed his graduation from Maynooth University where he’d completed a masters degree in international peacebuilding that had been partly financed by the Irish government.

The Loyalist Communities Council — of which Irvine has been a member — claims that young Protestant men are turning to paramilitaries because ‘jobs for life’ in shipyards and factories are no longer an option.

Winkie Irvine is not an impoverished youth starved of educational or economic opportunities.

Far from it. He is a 49-year-old man educated to masters level — courtesy of Dublin — who has not been short of well-paid work over the years.

Indeed, he’s held more publicly funded positions than I can remember. Among them was his £35,000-a-year job as a senior project manager with north Belfast-based interface organisation Intercomm. At the time of his arrest, he’d been due to start work on a £258,000 taxpayer-funded project to help ex-paramilitaries re-engage with civilised society.

It was financed by the controversial Communities in Transition (CIT) programme managed by Stormont’s Executive Office.

The International Fund for Ireland (IFI) has provided almost £1m to ‘peace-building’ groups linked to Irvine.

In 2022, the IFI launched a multi-million pound programme to encourage safer community celebrations around loyalist bonfires, with groups encouraged to apply for grants.

Irvine sat on the panel which heard these applications.

While on bail seven months ago, he organised a major conference on unionist and loyalist cultural expression on behalf of Building Cultural Networks.

It’s part of the ACT initiative — a “conflict transformation programme” set up on the Shankill to facilitate the “civilianisation” of the UVF and “develop the capacity” of former members.

Irvine’s conviction should lead to many red faces among those who fund ‘peace’ groups, and the public and political figures who fawn over them.

It should put paid to the baloney that ongoing paramilitarism in working-class unionist areas is first and foremost down to poverty and deprivation.

There was nothing bleak or broken about the world which Winkie Irvine inhabited. He was deprived of neither money nor career options. He had status inside and outside his community.

He enjoyed endless opportunities, with the doors of some very important people always open to him.

Irvine has previously been a member of the North Belfast Policing and Community Safety Partnership. He was actually paid public money every time he attended meetings with PSNI chiefs to discuss combatting crime in his area.

In 2016, he took part in legacy talks with the Archbishop of Canterbury at his residence, Lambeth Palace. The agenda also included “peace and reconciliation”.

A BBC Spotlight investigation three years earlier had unmasked Irvine as an active UVF commander. He was also revealed to be the balaclava-wearing loyalist making a sinister speech at a 1998 commemoration for sectarian killer Brian Robinson.

Four years after the Combined Loyalist Military Command’s (CLMC) ceasefire, he was happy to promote violence.

“In the past we have defended your liberty from the onslaught of violent nationalism,” he told the crowd. “Today, we may have to do so again against those who have attacked our people and culture.”

Irvine, who initially denied the 2022 offences, admitted possessing firearms and ammunition in suspicious circumstances on Monday ahead of his trial.

A long-barrelled firearm, two suspected pistols, and a large quantity of ammunition were found in the boot of his car when he was stopped by police near the Liverpool Club in Disraeli Street.

Nine magazines were also discovered including one for the SA80 assault rifle which is used by the British Army. The weapons were — very aptly — inside a leather Calvin Klein holdall.

This was designer terrorism — there’s no need for a cut-price approach when you’re flush with cash.

Let’s remember that Irvine’s conviction comes three decades after the CLMC declared a ceasefire. Loyalist paramilitaries clearly have not disarmed, disbanded nor ceased activity.

And yet those unionist politicians who work themselves into a frenzy over the IRA remain silent on this one.

The press statements of concern and condemnation, the impassioned and enraged social media posts, are absent.

A peculiar place is Northern Ireland.

Urgent Appeal