Paramilitary-style “punishment” shootings and beatings have surged again across Northern Ireland, with a 60% increase in such attacks over the past four years, according to the latest police figures obtained by the Guardian.
News of the rise in dissident republican and Ulster loyalist assaults on people within their respective communities came as the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland revealed that some victims’ parents were drugging and getting their loved ones drunk before they were beaten or shot to offset the pain.
The PSNI chief constable, George Hamilton, told the Guardian that some close relatives of those about to be attacked were plying their children with alcohol or giving them powerful painkillers before “appointments” with the “punishment” gangs.
From 2013 to the end of last year the number of shootings and assaults from republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations has increased dramatically.
Figures from the PSNI’s statistics branch show that in 2013 there were 64 such attacks from republican dissidents as well as ongoing loyalist paramilitary violence directed at their own communities. In 2017 the figure rose to 101 shootings and beatings.
The level of these attacks was up almost 60% compared with four years earlier.
The upsurge in paramilitary punishment attacks took a more lethal turn this year with the murder of Raymond Johnston on 13 February while he cooked pancakes at his home in west Belfast.
The PSNI believes Johnston, 28, was targeted by the New IRA, a hardline anti-peace process republican faction that often uses the flag of convenience Action Against Drugs to target victims from within the Catholic/nationalist community in Northern Ireland.
The statistics also show that republican dissidents appear more likely to use guns to shoot those inside their respective communities that they label as criminals or “antisocial elements”.
According to the PSNI figures showing the total number of victims shot in this latest wave of paramilitary “punishment” attacks, dissident republican groups such as the New IRA or Continuity IRA have been responsible for 24 out of the 27 people wounded by firearms.
Many of the victims are often savagely beaten after being accused by armed republican and loyalist factions of criminal actions such as drug dealing or car theft, without any form of legal representation or appeal.
In 2013 four physical beatings were carried out by republican dissidents but within the past four years this has increased to 17.
Meanwhile, loyalist paramilitaries, who are supposedly meant to be on ceasefire, appear more inclined to carry out beatings than shootings against those who cross them within mainly working-class unionist/Protestant areas.
In 2013 the figures show that 34 assaults were carried out by those aligned to certain factions of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. In 2017 the number had increased to 57.
Responding to the upsurge in paramilitary “punishment attacks”, which in the case of dissident republicans is a means of offering the nationalist community an “alternative quick-fix” form of policing to the PSNI, the chief constable said some parents were “acquiescing” in this system by bringing their children to appointments for beatings and shootings.
Hamilton said: “You have a culture of lawlessness and fear in some of these communities where the victims know who is shooting them; the parent knows who is shooting their child. Sometimes parents are negotiating with these thugs to take the kid to certain places by arrangement.
“It is not unknown to my officers that in certain circumstances parents have dosed their kids up with powerful painkillers and alcohol to remove the impact of the ‘punishment’ shooting or beating. By colluding in this they [the parents] are hoping to negotiate less severe beatings or shootings. There is something madly wrong with society whenever parents even countenance doing that with their own children.”
Hamilton said he did not blame the parents but saw it as an indication of the climate of fear paramilitary organisations were imposing on the areas they operated in.
He said those behind such attacks were “quasi-terrorists who were and are very good at covering their forensic tracks”.
In the absence of forensic evidence Hamilton said even victims were reluctant to identify those behind attacks.
Liam Kennedy, a Queen’s University of Belfast lecturer and long-term campaigner against paramilitary “punishment” attacks, said that given the young ages of many of those targeted the practice was “tantamount to child abuse”.Kennedy, the author of a major study into the long-term practice of alternative paramilitary policing in Northern Ireland titled They Shoot Children Don’t They?, said: “The trend is still alarmingly upwards. The last month has been a particularly vicious month. The victims are mainly young men from working-class areas, and not even children are immune. Last year three children were singled out for mutilation through gunshot wounds to the legs. This is child abuse of a kind comparable to the actions of paedophiles.”
He called on international human rights organisations to speak out more against the practices, which he said were “week-by-week serious human rights violations”.