"We need the community to get involved," said Sinn Féin assembly member Willie Clarke in response to Monday's drive-by shootings in Newcastle.
"We need to set up community restorative justice where the community comes together and begins to solve problems within the community."
It would appear that Mr Clarke sets a great deal of store by the community. But what does he mean by 'the community', exactly? Does he mean all the residents of Newcastle's Burrendale estate, where this 'dispute between individuals' boiled over? If he does then Mr Clarke's bold plan to resolve the matter raises some further difficulties. For example, the four victims of the attack and possibly also the culprits are themselves residents of the estate. The head of the local community association says some other residents are understandably "frightened and upset" by this – so universal participation in any community initiative seems unlikely. Then there is the small matter of the 9,135 Newcastle residents out of an adult population of 11,446 who did not vote for Sinn Féin at the last election. Presumably these people would prefer to see crime dealt with via the non-republican method of policing, prosecutions, courts and convictions. Presumably, also, a number of these people live in the Burrendale estate. Are they part of the community?
Given that those who don't support Sinn Féin make up 80% of the adult population in a 74% Catholic town, might they even form the majority of Burrendale's community?
Suppose that Sinn Féin convenes a community meeting in the community centre where the community decides that it wants to restore justice to the community not through community restorative justice but by demanding and supporting action from the PSNI. Would Mr Clarke accept the verdict of the community? Or would he declare, in the style of Martin McGuinness, that Burrendale was 'the wrong sort of community'? Alas we will never know, because those from the wrong sort of community would never attend such a meeting. They know, as do we all, that anyone bandying the word 'community' about in Northern Ireland is grinding an axe on the edge of a box into which they have placed you already.
Also on Monday a magistrate in Derry found two 'peace workers' guilty of taking part in a sectarian riot between rival gangs of youths.
The men – pathetically both in their thirties – belong to the Protestant Interface Network, which describes itself as an organisation which works to "limit violence and promote peace and a better quality of life for Protestant Communities situated amid sectarian interfaces".
This must be one of the most exclusive communities in Northern Ireland, comprising only Protestants who network along interfaces to simultaneously prevent and participate in recreational rioting.
Even by local standards this is an extremely flexible use of the word 'community' – but then no other word, with the possible exception of 'culture', appears to have such an elastic application. We often assume that community is synonymous with neighbourhood but that is not the case. Neighbourhood implies shared space and, at most, shared everyday experience. Community additionally implies shared values and beliefs. As they do not occupy the same dimensions, neighbourhoods and communities cannot neatly overlap. What happens to people who find themselves in one but not the other? How much does it matter? Who decides? When we fail to ask ourselves these questions, power passes to anyone with an answer. Hence a tiny territory with four layers of elected representation – including council wards covering only 2,000 people – acquires countless layers of unelected 'community' representation as well. This then infects the ruling bureaucracy, which demands to know if people are members of the Protestant community or the Catholic community because that is how it views the neighbourhood.
Finally the whole system goes mainstream as the quango class fills our days and its diaries with community projects, community festivals, community art and anything else it can stick the word 'community' in front of to justify more snouts in the trough.
Because community implies grassroots legitimacy it is an ideal disguise for such top-down exercises in social control. Being so deliberately ill-defined it is also a tricky disguise to unmask. But unmask it we must if we are not to be told who we are, what we are, how to think and where to think it by everyone anxious to group us under their own agendas. A fair society, as St Augustine observed, must comprise one community of law.
The people of Burrendale deserve nothing less – whether Willie Clarke likes it or not.
