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Organised crime and terrorist financing in Northern Ireland
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| 15 August 2002 |
By Richard Evans
The UK's Organised Crime Task Force (OCTF) claimed in its 2002 threat assessment that the activities of 42 of the 79 organised criminal groups identified in Northern Ireland had been disrupted over the previous 12 months.
According to the report, 43 groups have had members arrested for a variety of serious offences, and 24 have had members successfully prosecuted for crimes ranging from smuggling, deception and forgery, to illegal possession of firearms, money laundering and drug dealing.
The report stated that only 37 of the groups previously identified exist in the same form - some are fractured due to law enforcement activity, while others have moved into other forms of organised crime or aligned themselves with rival groups.
The involvement of both loyalist and republican terrorist groups with organised crime complicates law enforcement activities in the province and has given rise to different patterns of criminal activity from those seen on the mainland UK. It has also encouraged the formation of multi-agency approaches, as witnessed by the creation of the OCTF, which operates under the auspices of the Northern Ireland Office, in 2001.
Of the estimated 79 main organised criminal gangs identified by the OCTF in its 2001 threat assessment, roughly half were thought to have current or historic links to loyalist or republican terrorist organisations. This year, the number involved has fallen slightly, with the degree of involvement of the paramilitaries remaining consistent.
Police, intelligence agencies and academics have all made efforts to calculate the funding required by the paramilitaries to sustain their campaigns. In the case of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), for example, estimates range from US$1m to $15m a year. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) recently estimated the PIRA to have annual running costs of roughly $2.31m, although its estimated fundraising capacity is thought to be much higher, at $7.7-12.3m.
There is persistent evidence that despite the ceasefire, both loyalist and republican terrorist groups continue to raise funds through organised crime, although their precise areas of interest vary. A source attached to the OCTF claims that while drug dealing and racketeering are principal areas of interest for loyalist groups, the more complicated logistical enterprises such as fuel smuggling are undertaken by the PIRA and dissident republicans.
An OCTF official told JIR that while the membership and allegiances of mainstream criminal groups appears relatively fluid, those with paramilitary associations continue to operate to more rigid paramilitary structures with stricter codes of discipline. "Those individuals may still be members of ASUs [Active Service Units] and as such may be more disciplined," said the official. "Some may well be creaming off a certain amount of profit for themselves but, generally, that internal disciplinary structure will still be there." Assistant Chief Constable Steven White of the PSNI, in evidence to the NIAC earlier this year, said: "Vast sums of money haemorrhage[s]... from criminal activity through to the organisation... Some of the [early-release prisoners] are now entirely in this business to create a pension fund for themselves."
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