Our proconsul issued a brief statement on February 12 which went largely unnoticed. A pity, because the announcement of the Local Community Fund bears close examination.
A preliminary look seems to indicate conclusive evidence that NIO senior civil servants resemble the courtiers around France's exiled King Louis XVIII in 1795. General Dumouriez said they had "forgotten nothing and learnt nothing".
Twenty years later, after escaping from Elba, Napoleon was able to drive home the point by quoting Dumouriez when Louis XVIII and his clique had to make a run for it again.
On closer inspection, however, the announcement looks suspiciously like a Tony Blair stunt. Typical Blair: flash, poorly thought out, cheap, superficial, fool's gold.
You know, the sort of thing you see on Rory Bremner's show. 'Give me something eye-catching to say if they ask about loyalist violence, something that looks as if I give a damn.'
Just like curfews for teenagers which have never been used and Blair's whizzo scheme for
frog-marching lager louts to a 'hole in the wall' machine for an instant fine. Twenty-four hours that lasted – or was it a weekend? If Blair keeps going he'll soon be as good as Bremner.
An 'initial budget' of £3 million, our proconsul's statement said. No details yet, of course, on how or where it will be administered or by whom. You can see straight away how much planning went into it. No consultation either. Just
bare-faced colonial edict.
We do know it's designed for loyalist areas to reward them for being anti-agreement. Not loyalist north Belfast, though, which got £5 million last year as a reward for two years of rioting and for stopping the despicable attacks on the girls of Holy Cross school.
Obviously loyalist gangsters who control sink estates in Antrim, Larne and Ballymena will have to review their activity because the prime minister is ignoring them. It's true, they do suffer the handicap that whereas Ardoyne, the Short Strand and Newington are only 10 minutes from the studios of BBC and UTV, trailing away out to dreary Larne is too tiresome for a news team. Look what loyalists in Portadown had to do to get noticed.
Yes folks, our proconsul actually said the fund was for people who "feel they have been left behind" in the progress made by this wunnerful part of the island. No reference to why they feel they are "left behind" – nothing to do with the incompetence or bigotry of their political leaders. Nope, on the contrary, fulsome praise for their political leaders whom our proconsul's speech writers wrongly identified as David Ervine and his PUP colleagues. They were, the statement said, 'a beacon in the violent storms of recent times', a reference perhaps to PUP/UVF activities during the UDA/UVF feud in 2000 or maybe during the attacks on the Short Strand last year. By the way, can you imagine an NIO statement describing Sinn Féin leaders like that?
Anyway, whatever luminous activity the speech writer had in mind is irrelevant because loyalist communities don't vote for the PUP and certainly not for the UDA. If they vote at all, they vote overwhelmingly for the DUP who will not benefit one iota from this fund. Who will? None other than the NIO's favourite paramilitary group, the UDA.
It will be an action replay of west Belfast in the early eighties when the NIO threw money at the place. Soon they noticed that every corner had a community group and Sinn Féin was running it. The NIO's answer was to recruit Catholic clergy as entrepreneurs because you couldn't trust anyone else with the money, not even, as it turned out, some civil servants who ended up convicted of embezzlement.
It all ended in tears, although the priests were blameless, with the Audit Office demanding to know where the vanished millions had gone. Down the Swanee.
Now, 20 years on, the NIO intends to resurrect the same processes. This time it's Protestant clergy. As in Catholic west Belfast, it will have absolutely no political effect. The community leaders are not clergy. The people who "have been left behind" do not go to church. In working-class areas of Belfast, Catholic or Protestant, less than 15% of people under 30 practise a religion.
When the Local Community Fund dries up in a year or two's time and the money has been squandered by the UDA in Tenerife, those who vote will continue to vote DUP, not PUP, and our proconsul's eulogy will do the PUP no good at all.
Still, the NIO has plenty of experience wasting money in these districts. Their motto seems to be: 'Been there, done that, change the date on the T-shirt.'
