Republicans were trying to create “no go” areas for Protestants in rural parts of Northern Ireland, taoiseach Bertie Ahern was told when he brought leading loyalist figures to Dublin in 2003.
The loyalists were members of the Loyalist Commission, which was set up in the wake of the feud between Ulster Defence Association figure Johnny Adair against the Ulster Volunteer Force on the Shankill Road from 2000 to 2002.
The meeting, which was also attended by the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Robin Eames, included the commission’s chair, the grand secretary of the Orange Order, Mervyn Gibson.
Insisting that republicans were bent on ethnic cleansing in a strategy “that went back to 1641”, Bill McCaughey from North Antrim said republicans “spoke the language of peace, but continued a campaign of low-level intimidation”.
Welcoming the group to Dublin, Ahern said his own father had been “a good rebel” in his time, adding that he himself devoted so much time to Northern Ireland because he wanted to bring peace and stability there.
He was, he told them, “absolutely sincere” in his efforts to work with loyalists and others: “We could not change the past, but we respected different beliefs and traditions,” he was recorded as saying.
Jim Wilson, who was then an Ulster Unionist Party Stormont MLA for East Belfast, said Sinn Féin “operated a powerful propaganda machine” that was able to set the narrative about Northern Ireland.
Dozens of loyalist families had had to quit their homes in Cluan Place in East Belfast next door to the Catholic-dominated Short Strand because of intimidation in 2002, but “this was never reported”, he complained.
Nothing had been done since the Belfast Agreement in 1998 to help communities such as Cluan Place: the tensions that had been on display in 2002 were “worse than anything he had seen since 1969”.
`Sincerity’
Responding to the taoiseach, Jackie McDonald, then and now a significant figure in loyalist circles, said “the sincerity” of his approach did not come across to the people in his community.
“They felt threatened, isolated and second-class. They believed that there was an iron triangle of the British and Irish governments and Sinn Féin working against them,” he told Mr Ahern.
Replying, Ahern said he would not have collapsed the Stormont institutions in the way that the British government had done in the wake of the Stormontgate controversy, where it was alleged that an IRA spy ring operated inside Stormont.
He said he had asked voters in the Republic to give up Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, but the devolved government in Stormont and the North/South bodies that they were promised in return were nowhere to be seen.
“The loyalist community did not seem to appreciate that we had given away Articles 2 and 3 which were held dear by Irish people. He was not interested in running Northern Ireland, but he wanted North/South bodies to work,” a note records.
However, Jim Wilson rejected Ahern’s argument. Articles 2 and 3 “should not have been there in the first place”, he said, while from the perspective of loyalists the Belfast Agreement “was all green, white and gold”.
Ken Wilkinson, a former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force who died in 2021, said loyalists felt that their communities were being eroded: “Blue, red and white was seen as sectarian, but green, white and gold was called culture,” the note goes on.
The group questioned why the killers of Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army soldiers in Northern Ireland had been released, while the IRA members who killed Det Gda Jerry McCabe in Adare, Co Limerick in 1996 remained in jail.
Replying, Ahern said the men, who were then being held in Castlerea jail, had been “disowned” by the IRA and “were treated for what they were – bandits operating in Limerick who shot two Garda detectives”.