SENIOR SOUTH Belfast UDA figure Jackie McDonald, who appeared in a political debate at the West Belfast Festival yesterday with a leading republican Seán “Spike” Murray, said he could hardly have envisaged such an encounter in previous years.
Mr McDonald, who is one of the UDA’s six so-called brigadiers and is friendly with President Mary McAleese and her husband, Martin, attended the West Belfast Youth Talks Back event at St Louise’s Convent on the Falls Road yesterday afternoon.
The meeting, chaired by journalist Ann Cadwallader, also featured the PSNI district commander for west and north Belfast, Mark Hamilton, Alliance lord mayor of Belfast, Naomi Long, and Stephen Carr, a youth officer with the Belfast Education Library Board. Ms Cadwallader said the participants should be on first name terms for proceedings. They had no difficulty in following her instructions.
Both Mr McDonald and Mr Murray, who is now a senior figure in Sinn Féin, were described as being involved in community work in their respective loyalist and nationalist areas, with both also engaging in across-the-peace-walls liaison at times of sectarian tension.
“It is a strange set-up, this,” acknowledged Mr McDonald about the line-up for the talks. “Who ever would have thought that the likes of either Seán, Mark or myself would be sitting in the same place, other than in Castlereagh or Antrim [police] holding centre,” he added.
He said he and loyalists in general often received a better reception from republicans than they did from mainstream unionist politicians. He said unionist politicians did not know what to do with loyalism. “Republicans actually have extended the hand of friendship more than some unionist colleagues,” he said.
The debate was generally serious and courteous, with young people asking some hard questions about issues such Orange Order parades, racism, sectarianism, flag flying, plastic bullets, the transfer of policing and justice powers, and the loyalist mob murder in Coleraine of Kevin McDaid.
