Northern Ireland A Different Kind of Terror

By Michael S. Serrill

Extortion, protection rackets and tax fraud are the stuff of daily life. There are threats and occasionally even executions. It sounds like Al Capone's Chicago or Mafia-dominated Sicily in the days of gangland wars. But instead, all those evils are flourishing in today's Northern Ireland in neighborhoods controlled by extremists. Says Brian Feeney, a Belfast city councilor: "This is real godfather stuff. Everybody pays. If you don't, they threaten to harm your family or workers."

For Belfast the nightmare began in the late 1960s, when the long political conflict involving pro-British Protestants and Catholic nationalists turned violent. The gun battles and bombings of the 1970s reduced whole blocks to rubble, and some neighborhoods became deadly "no-go" zones, where even Ulster police and British troops feared to enter. When at last the violence began to subside in 1982, Britain backed a major face-lift for the blighted city. Crumbling old slums and bomb sites were rebuilt as part of a $1.4 billion housing program for low-income districts.

Now authorities have discovered that the same terrorist gangs that turned Belfast into a sectarian battleground have siphoned off millions of dollars from the reconstruction to finance their continuing war. As money for new construction pours into Belfast, paramilitary forces on both sides demand a cut of the profits. This Ulster Mafia exacts its levies from local businesses, and if people do not pay up, a bomb or a shot in the night may follow.

On the Catholic side, factions of the Irish Republican Army and its offshoot the Irish National Liberation Army are leading the crime wave. Accused of taking in the money for the Protestants are members of the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force. In the interest of maximizing profits, warring Catholic and Protestant groups that cannot agree on much else have tacitly decided not to encroach on each other's territory. The I.R.A. and I.N.L.A. have the Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast to themselves, while the neighboring Shankill district and East Belfast are Protestant territory.

With more than 11,000 new and renovated homes, the amount of money skimmed off by the extremists is thought to add up to millions of dollars. "Wherever the terrorists have influence, you can be absolutely certain that builders or their workers are having to make a deal," says a senior police official. For a share of the contract price, the builder is guaranteed "security" for his project. If he fails to pay, his equipment may be damaged, his workers scared off the work site or his family threatened. Some of the more innovative extremist groups have founded legitimate security firms for the builders to hire.

To date, 130 people have faced charges in connection with tax frauds involving some $80 million in unpaid taxes. In one case, three men were convicted earlier this year in an elaborate scheme involving a bogus construction company and tax-exemption frauds. They handed the $320,000 the company collected over to the I.N.L.A. The judge in the case, Michael Nicholson, called the swindles "one of the most important sources of cash for terrorists."

The authorities claim that although some extremists are pocketing such funds, most of the money goes to sustain a continuing, if reduced, campaign of violence and to support the families of the 1,100 extremists held in Northern Ireland jails. Since so much income is produced by extortion and racketeering, the I.R.A. no longer has to depend as heavily on money collected from Irish Americans in the U.S. to finance its terror.

With reporting by Edmund Curran/Belfast