Article by Newton Emerson, from the 13 November 2008 edition of the Irish News:

Sir Hugh Orde made two revelations at last week’s policing board meeting regarding police contracts with a Portadown building firm once owned by a prominent member of the UVF.

The first was that the contracts totalled almost £5 million between 1999 and 2004, rather than the £320,000 initially stated. The second was that the firm in question, the Jameson Group, failed PSNI security vetting twice before the NIO cleared it on appeal.

Sinn Fein MLA Martina Anderson, who raised the issue in connection with the murders of Portadown teenagers Andrew Robb and Paul McIlwaine, described police building contracts as “one of the ways in which unionist death squads were rewarded by the state for their role in collusion”.

As usual, Ms Anderson protests just a little too much. The McIlwaine family has only alleged the involvement of informers in the murder and informing is not colluding.

The PSNI is responsible for loyalist intelligence gathering and it is legally entitled to manage and reward informers. However, this matter goes far beyond the police.

In recent years the Jameson Group has secured contracts with the Court Service, the Prison Service and the Ministry of Defence, as well as various local authorities. These bodies also perform vetting procedures which the Jameson Group also presumably required NIO assistance to pass.

I am aware of one instance where RIR soldiers at a security briefing were shown photographs of a loyalist who was working, at that very moment, on the roof of the briefing room.

What we have here is not a PSNI system to reward informers but an NIO system to reward the cooperative.

The late Richard Jameson, former owner of the Jameson Group and the UVF ‘brigadier’ in mid-Ulster, was an early and open supporter of the peace process. Such was his support, in fact, that disgruntled members left to form the LVF, ultimately leading to the feud which cost Mr Jameson his life in January 2000 and Andrew Robb and David McIlwaine their lives a month later.

Semi-official systems to reward the cooperative undoubtedly exist. Industries which are otherwise heavily regulated appear mysteriously immune from regulation in the case of certain individuals. Even more mysteriously, these individuals can find themselves back under regulation if they cross accepted peace-process ‘red lines’ on crime or anti-agreement associations.

In private conversations about this with police officers I have been told to grow up and accept that the tens of thousands of people with paramilitary pasts are still with us in the present and must be coaxed into the future. But if the need for this is so obvious, must the coaxing be so totally unaccountable?

Northern Ireland has a commissi oner for everything except corruption. The Assets Recovery Agency can not investigate fraud by public-sector bodies and the Audit Office never touches anything even vaguely process-related. The media is blinded by “security” excuses at every turn.

The Jameson Group case was raised at the policing board by Sinn Fein but the rarity of this example only highlights how reluctant all our politicians are to trespass on the financial patch of each other’s tribal turf.

The result of this unaccountability is creeping corruption and commensurate public cynicism. The Jameson Group case has now drawn in so many agencies of the state that justice can not even be delivered for the psychotic butchering of two teenage boys, for fear of bringing down a whole official edifice of barely related appeasement.

Meanwhile, a fatal sense grows that Northern Ireland is becoming a quasi-Sicilian society. We feel the presence of a Cosy Nostra, if not quite yet a Cosa Nostra, with all the deep-seated damage that brings.

We can pride ourselves on being grown up about the price of peace. But where is the adult supervision of the cost of compromise?

For many years, small businesses in Portadown were asked to ‘donate’ to the UVF via its ‘ex-prisoners’ fund”. Those who refused were punished with armed robberies, for which nobody was punished at all. Now it transpires that they were making a donation anyway via their taxes – as was everybody else both then and, quite possibly, now.

A state this corrupt forfeits the authority to levy taxation. Perhaps that thought needs spread more widely before the NIO allows us an antidote to this poison.