It was endorsed by Tony Blair’s chief of staff and various senior ‘men of the cloth’ but beyond the increasingly questionable assertion that the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) was simply about transitioning paramilitaries, we know very little about this group.
Notably, when it emerged in 2015, amid a minor fanfare and in the presence of known figures from the loyalist underworld, there was no talk of disbandment or the standing down of paramilitary structures, with Jonathan Powell arguing it was preferable that the proscribed groups represented by the LCC continue on in a “civil fashion”.
Almost a decade on, drug and extortion gangs operating under the banners of the UVF and UDA continue to terrorise working class unionist communities.
The LCC purports to represent elements of the UVF and UDA but for this we only have the word of its chairman and sole public figure David Campbell. It’s understood elements of the UDA in east and north Antrim, as well as north Down don’t shelter under the LCC umbrella.
Mr Campbell, a former adviser to David Trimble and for the past three years a board member of the Agrifood and Biosciences Institute, has no historical association with loyalist paramilitaries.
More recently, the LCC has emerged as what’s best described as a lobby group, meeting with DUP ministers to apparently raise concerns around issues like housing and educational underachievement. These are worthy causes but is a group representing those who sell teenagers drugs and burn people out of their homes best equipped to campaign on such matters?
More than 205 other legally constituted groups have sought access to Education Minister Paul Givan in the past eight months but their request has been denied.
The DUP has helped to give legitimacy to a group that won’t make itself available for scrutiny.
Thirty years on from the loyalist ceasefire, the DUP – the party that cast itself as opposed to all forms of violence – is ill advised to indulge a group that in addition to not having a mandate has little or no credibility.
