Paramilitaries, Republicans and Loyalists

Abstract

The term paramilitary organisation is used to describe groups in Northern Ireland such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which employ violence or the threat of violence for political ends. Outside of Northern Ireland, where the term paramilitary tends to be used to describe the character of security forces rather than those operating outside the law, they are more commonly referred to as terrorists. The media and politicians in Northern Ireland use both terms. However, academic analysts of the conflict have generally preferred to describe groups engaged in political violence, including bombings and the random killings of civilians, as paramilitary organisations. The term terrorism does not even appear in the index of John Whyte’s magisterial survey of the literature on the conflict (Whyte, 1990). The reason for this is not sympathy among analysts of the conflict for the proponents of violence in either community in Northern Ireland. Rather it is principally because few academic analysts of the conflict would accept the assumptions that use of the term terrorism tends to imply, in particular, that a legitimate political order exists that is being challenged by the violence of a tiny minority of extremists on the fringe of society. The weakness of such a characterisation of the violence in Northern Ireland is that it underestimates the gravity of the conflict and the extent to which the violence is embedded in the deep sectarian divisions of the society. It also underestimates the historical roots of the use of violence by elements within each of the two main communities in Northern Ireland.