Weakness towards illegal republican displays merely emboldens them

It was the third anniversary yesterday of the murder of Lyra McKee by dissident republicans in Londonderry.

The late journalist’s family yesterday made a fresh appeal for information to bring her killer to justice.

Vigils were held in memory of Lyra, 29, including one by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

There was a horrible coincidence of timing in the Maiden City yesterday when a parade connected to the hardline republican group Saoradh was held to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising. Saoradh is accused of having links with the New IRA, which it denies. Parade organisers declined the requests of Ms McKee’s family that the event be postponed.

The parade ended in violence.

For years, dissident thugs have had a degree of strength in Londonderry. Yet there have been suggestions that the Northern Ireland authorities are partly to blame for this.

Fianna Fail TD Eamon O’Cuiv has previously endorsed some of their grievances (while making clear he opposes their violence). He attended a dissident trial in Londonderry, he accused police in the city of heavy-handed treatment of dissident suspects. He once flew to Lithuania with an IRA veteran to check an Irish man was not being tainted in an arms trial due to having a brother who was an Omagh bomber.

Meanwhile in 2018, the Republic’s then Fine Gael deputy prime minister Simon Coveney said that the imprisonment of the dissident republican Tony Taylor from Londonderry added to “community tensions in an unwelcome way”. Taylor was given an 18-year prison term in the 1990s for an explosion but freed early under the Belfast Agreement, then admitted in 2014 possessing a rifle, jailed again, then freed on licence, which has then revoked.

Is such political pressure why the PSNI has seemed (as the DUP politician Gary Middleton said yesterday) slow to act against past illegal republican displays?

If so, they should know by now that weakness does not placate such people, it emboldens them.