Loyalist communities in Northern Ireland have not seen any gains from the Belfast Agreement 25 years on, the chair of the Loyalist Communities Council, David Campbell has declared.
Speaking at a conference in Dublin, Mr Campbell, a former chair of the Ulster Unionist Party, graphically illustrated the challenges facing loyalists from working class, or unemployed backgrounds.
Describing the life prospects of a child born yesterday into a loyalist community, Mr Campbell said the child will “stay in hospital longer than most other babies because he may need to be weaned off substances his mother had become addicted to”.
“When he gets home, it may well be a single parent family and to a very young mother. If he is lucky, there will be an extended family to help him,” Mr Campbell told the conference held in Dublin City University on the role played by community groups in the peace process.
There will be “few toys” and little verbal interaction at home for that child, he went on, so that by the time the is ready to go to preschool “his speech and vocabulary may at least be a year behind the national average”, he said.
“He will attend a primary school that is so underfunded that there are insufficient teachers or classroom assistants to help him with his schoolwork. So he falls further behind,” Mr Campbell, who was involved in the deal’s negotiations, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998 and before.
Between 60 and 80 per cent of pupils in the child’s school will qualify for free school meals because of the level of social deprivation in the community: “He will regularly miss breakfast. Often the school meal is the only nourishment he will receive in the day,” he said.
“He will be introduced to drugs either to encourage him become addicted to them, or to run deliveries for the peddlers outside the school,” said Mr Campbell.
Paying tribute to “the monumental efforts” played by Washington over the years, Mr Campbell said the political guidance and the patience shown particularly during the Clinton and Bush presidencies “worked certainly from a unionist perspective”.
However, he implicitly criticised US president Joe Biden by saying that there is a need “to restore the impartiality” of the United State in the peace process if it is to continue to play an influential role in current problems in Northern Ireland.
Mr Campbell said he believed that the majority of unionism accept the tenets of the Belfast Agreement and the need for powersharing, even if that is not accepted by the Traditional unionist Voice leader, Mr Jim Allister.
He said he “fundamentally believed” that the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Jeffrey Donaldson, aimed to restore Northern Ireland’s political institutions and “is prepared to re-enter the administration under a Sinn Féin first minister”.
However, he said he did not believe that restoration can happen until there is “sufficient progress” on the Northern Ireland Protocol, which has created an unacceptable division between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.
