Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland did not stop committing crimes after the ceasefires in 1994. Nor did they quietly disband after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

A 2015 report, compiled from evidence gathered by MI5, the PSNI and An Garda Síochána, confirmed as much. Indeed it also made the startling claim that all the paramilitary groups who were active during the troubles continued to have a presence in present day Northern Ireland. Not much has changed in the intervening two years.

And while political parties tend to distance themselves from paramilitaries (or flirt with them, as the case may be) around election time, there hasn’t yet been a constructive, bilateral strategy for phasing out these groups.

Behind The Mask

Aaron Edwards, who grew up in a loyalist estate near North Belfast, received huge media attention following the release of his book UVF: Behind The Mask last month, with the first 3,000 copies selling out within a week.

There’s good reason for this. Unlike a lot of other writers who have documented the activities of paramilitaries, Aaron grew up alongside them. He knew people who were involved in criminal activities. He drank with them in bars and was given access into their lives and stories in a way that other writers could never dream of. Rather than seek to offer easy explanations for the group, Aaron’s book tells the story of individual human beings and their motivations for committing crimes.

“The idea behind this dates back to 2005, when the former UVF commander Billy Mitchell [a friend of Aaron’s] turned to me at a meeting in north Belfast and asked me when was I going to write a history of the UVF. “I’ve written extensively about the efforts of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) to take the UVF down the political path, and he wanted me to write a history before the people who were involved in these actions passed away.”

Aside from his close association with many who were active in the UVF, Aaron also lectures on Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst.

“I’ve been teaching people who are combatting terrorism in countries like East Africa and the Middle East,” he tells me. “I took a lot from my own work on terrorism worldwide, then turned inward and looked at an aspect of terrorism that was quite personal to me. I think that what I do differently, in this book compared to others, is examine why people are driven to commit violence in the name of their beliefs. But I’ve also tried to make a model that can be applied to people worldwide.”

The book provides a comprehensive overview of individual roles within the UVF and details the acts that each person was involved in.

The long-held idea that the UVF were colluding with the British Army to commit murders is largely rejected in this book, on the basis that the author has found no evidence for it. And while many of the events he describes make for difficult reading, possibly the starkest component of the story is Aaron’s refusal to tie his book up with easy conclusions. In the absence of these, you’re left to question just how effective the peace process has been at dealing with the underlying causes of the troubles.

Decommissioning The Mind-set

Aaron argues that although the violence may have stopped – and the British and Irish governments have turned to being mediators rather than enemies in Northern Ireland – the mind-set that sent people to commit violence still hasn’t been fully addressed.

“I believe there is an undercurrent of disaffection and disillusion growing amongst the youth,” says Aaron. “I’ve heard young people saying things like ‘We need to hit back’ in response to incidents like the removal of the Union flag from City Hall, or the dispute over marching in certain areas. The language that’s being used is redolent of the 1970s.”

The inability to change this decades-old mindset may be due, in part, to the wider failures of loyalism to make grounds in the Northern Irish political process, in the years following the Good Friday Agreement. In 2007, the PUP lost two of the strongest advocates of the peace and reconciliation process – Billy Mitchell and the MLA David Ervine. In the same year, the Northern Irish Police Ombudsman published a report known as Operation Ballast, which investigated collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the UVF, exposing a number of informants in the paramilitary group. This led to huge ructions and produced a period of what Aaron Edwards euphemistically calls “internal auditing” within the UVF.

Ten years on, loyalism has yet to recover politically. The PUP doesn’t have a single MLA in the Northern Irish Assembly, and the UVF was seen to move away from the left-wing, working-class roots of the party when it publicly endorsed the mainstream DUP at the latest Westminster elections (a particularly strange irony considering that many ex-UVF members have come out and denounced the party’s founder, Ian Paisley, for having led them to violence in the 1960s with his fiery rhetoric).

For Aaron Edwards, there is a pressing need to engage with paramilitaries in a meaningful way that brings them in from the cold and ensures there’s no return to violence. Any such engagement, however, must go beyond the partisan nature of Northern Ireland’s current political make-up.

“Republicans and loyalists can’t just say, ‘We’ll deal with our own side’. As far as I know, millions of pounds have been spent on the Northern Irish peace process and there are ex-IRA and UDA members able to share tea and buns together and get along. Why, for goodness sake, can’t they come up with a plan to stop people going down the road to violence?

“We need to move towards a collective reconciliation,” Aaron argues. “But that won’t happen as long as politics infects this process. What we are seeing is the weaponisation of the past. We are seeing the past being used a stick by one side to beat the other. I think that the main parties do what they have to do to secure votes. But the time has come for them to show real leadership, to finally put an end to these problems.”

UVF: Behind The Mask is out now on Irish Academic Press.