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Sectarian Murder in a Sectarian State

28/05/09

“Despite initial reports that the murdered man was caught up in fighting between rival soccer fans, it is now clear that the deceased was the innocent victim of a viscous, sectarian mob attack. His ‘crime’? Being a catholic in a unionist dominated town.”

This report, or something very similar to it, could easily apply to a notorious incident in Portadown in 1997. Depressingly, the year in question is 2009, not 1997; the town is Coleraine, not Portadown; and the victim’s name is Kevin McDaid, not Robert Hamill.

Coleraine, like many others across the Six Counties, is a town with an isolated nationalist population who suffer as a result of the supremacy complex inherent within unionism. Usually, this need to display supremacy manifests itself in the political domination of local power structures and resources, petty harassment, the flaunting of pro-British, sectarian effigies and slogans at every opportunity and in ritualised, provocative processions.

All too often, however, the all-compelling desire the keep the Croppies down ends in extreme violence. Addled by a mindset of pure sectarianism, aided and abetted by decades of discrimination and given political and, in many cases, practical cover by a state whose raison d’être is to hold Ireland’s north-east for ‘Us’ against ‘Them’, the leap to violence is not a big one.

This is what happened on Sunday [May 24] in Coleraine. The occasion of a Glasgow Rangers soccer game provided the pretext for the unionist pub gathering, alcohol provided the courage, catholic residents the provocation and sectarianism the motivation.

As a result, Kevin McDaid is dead, his wife Evelyn is badly injured and another man, Damien Fleming, is fighting for his life in hospital.

‘Respectable’ unionism has reacted to the murder in typical fashion, equivocating to the point of providing political cover for the killers.

This was DUP councillor Adrian McQuillan’s response to Sunday’s events: “What reason can you see for there being tricolours up yesterday afternoon, a Sunday afternoon? None other than for to get a reaction from the loyalist community and they certainly got a reaction this time, which is very sad.”

In McQuillan’s book, the display of the Irish national flag in a nationalist area provides perfect reasoning for mob violence. In 1964, councillor McQuillan’s former party leader Ian Paisley believed the same thing when he led an attack on Belfast’s Falls Road to remove the national flag from a shop window.

Another DUP councillor, when asked whether a unionist march in Coleraine tomorrow [Friday] should still go ahead, remarked that “life goes on”.

The Pride of the Bann flute band has now rerouted its march away from the scene of Mr McDaid’s death, despite “no small degree of anger” on the part of the organisers. But, tomorrow evening, around 2,000 loyalists and 40 sectarian marching bands will gather in Coleraine for a glorified repeat of the drink-fuelled behaviour that led to Sunday’s violence.

And what of the state’s response to this carnage?

On the night itself, it now appears that the PSNI allowed Mr McDaid to die – that they stood back and watched while the well-respected community worker was kicked to death.

Ryan McDaid, one of Kevin’s sons, who was at the scene, gave this account:

“The police sat and watched as Dad died, they never moved.

“When dad staggered up and he fell I was trying to bring him around again and I rang the ambulance on my mobile as he was in my arms. Police arrived in a van and ran up and gave Dad CPR but it was too little too late.”

For those unfamiliar with the brutal history of policing in the Six Counties, this account might sound like an appalling and unlikely vista. For nationalists who have experienced the policing of the RUC and PSNI at first hand, it is nothing but the same old story.

The PSNI’s response since Sunday has hardly engendered confidence either.

Contradicting well-informed local opinion, the PSNI has consistently denied the involvement of the Coleraine UDA in the mob attack and insinuated that the whole incident was a spontaneous occurrence. This is despite the fact that the there is a history of unionist attacks in the area, the attackers themselves shouted that they were from the UDA and one of those since arrested was a member of the UDA’s now-defunct Ulster Democratic Party.

Now, however, the PSNI has visited the home of Kevin McDaid’s son to inform him his life is under threat. Is it the spontaneously sectarian, completely unaligned mob that killed Mr McDaid that is now planning to kill his son? No, according to the PSNI, the uninvolved unionist paramilitaries are the ones threatening Mr McDaid Jnr, for reasons unknown.

A number of people have been arrested in connection with Kevin McDaid’s murder; some of them may well be charged, convicted and serve sentences. But it is the distinct possibility that the PSNI witnessed the murder, failed to intervene, and is now covering for the organisations, as opposed to the personnel, involved in the attack that points to the unchanged nature of policing in the Six Counties.

The pattern of state connivance at sectarian attacks in the Six Counties is well-defined – a pattern that is again rearing its ugly head.

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