The entire Irish nationalist political establishment, North and South, has been meeting, facilitating and funding paramilitary-linked loyalist groups for over a quarter of a century. This is the bleakly comic backdrop to complaints about links between loyalists and anti-immigrant figures in the Republic. However, it has taken the hoax bomb attack on Simon Coveney in Belfast two years ago to finally bring the absurdity home.

Last Thursday, the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement demanded to know why four loyalist community organisations are being supported by the International Fund for Ireland, which is run by the British and Irish governments. A former director of one of the organisations is facing charges connected to the Coveney attack.

In Northern Ireland, similar funding arrangements exist on a larger scale, as part of Stormont and Westminster all-party policies to “transition” loyalists away from paramilitarism. At Stormont and in councils, Sinn Féin and the DUP divvy up further pots of cash between their favoured community groups. As in the Republic, the same questions are increasingly asked: why do loyalist paramilitaries still exist and why are we paying them to go........

© The Irish Times