The Ulster Maister Folk Nae Taigs Nae Muslims Big Hoose, which is roughly translated into English from Ulster Scots as “The Loyalist Communities Council” (LCC), is a community organisation like no other I am aware of in Europe. It is currently in the news because it is objecting to the opening of nursery and primary school in a part of Belfast it considers is under its control. Scoil na Seolta will be open to any child in the area and will deliver its lessons in Irish.  

Their view is that six year olds learning songs like this is  “weaponisation of the language to act as a means of de-Britishifying Northern Ireland and imposing it on communities where it has never had any resonance or demand”. This, despite the fact that parents have to actively choose to send their kids to the school and are free to pull them out at any time.

The LCC is comprised mainly of representatives of loyalist murder gangs the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando. They have identified what we could charitably interpret as a lack of a party representing the interests of working class people in Protestant areas of the six counties and have put themselves forward as the solution.

“We accept the democratically expressed will of the electorate, however a vacuum in loyalist communities has been created which has led to significant disenchantment with politics, and to our communities being largely ignored and neglected.”

Their efforts to get an electoral mandate in working class areas have been consistently unsuccessful, and while the DUP and TUV are on the right and extreme right of European politics they undeniably have a democratic legitimacy. As is the way of things the two larger unionist parties are tail ending the sectarian demands of the LCC and DUP councillors voted against allowing the school to use a vacant site.

Bobby Rodgers is typical of the sort of man involved in the LCC. His principal qualification for the role was being convicted of two sectarian murders. The Belfast Telegraph has stories every week about how these self-appointed representatives of the working class are involved in sexual assaults, drug dealing and running money lending rackets in Protestant communities. This doesn’t stop them from rolling up to meetings with DUP ministers on “the subject of educational underachievement and inequality in loyalist areas, particularly in relation to loyalist teenage boys”. These organisations actively recruit loyalist teenage boys into their drug and extortion operations and are probably the principal cause of underachievement in the areas they dominate.

Rough comparisons to how the LCC operates in the six counties  would be Baltimore Police Department giving a load of cash to Stringer Bell to sell drugs just so long as he didn’t kill anyone or the Italian government paying the Camorra not to kidnap people but allowing them to run brothels and extortion rackets. The Dublin and London governments both give the LCC and organisations it controls  in the region of £800 000 a year.

They are the problem.

Demographic changes in the six counties have obliged the LCC  to move with the times. The organisations it represents, chafing at no longer being able to organise anti-Catholic pogroms, were heavily involved in the summer’s racist riots and are vocally Islamophobic. Their opposition to children learning Irish is a bunch of old men searching for a grievance and some relevance, but there is a serious side to it. People whose views appear to align with those of the LCC have been attacking a pitch used by a GAA team and phoning in bomb scares. Part of their political heritage was throwing bombs at primary school children. They are not going to do this but it indicates what they are willing to do in the name of sectarian warfare.  

The good news is that it looks like Scoil na Seolta is going to be a great success. The big question is why in 2024 a group of men who began in murder gangs and now speak for drug gangs receive money from two governments and are listened to by ministers.

Let no one ever try to convince you that the six counties is anything other than a mini state built on sectarianism.