Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Justice – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 2:30 pm on 17 June 2024.
The obvious thing that most of us can see is that many groups have successfully transitioned with no government support: they have transitioned fully into organised crime gangs. Where they want to make a step change in function, they seem capable of doing it without support from anywhere else. Group transition, in the sense of those organisations becoming post-conflict organisations, is not the answer. Those individuals need to transition to being law-abiding members of our community. They need to integrate into society on the same basis as the rest of us and cease the coercive control, threat and intimidation that they wield. Some people refer to these as shows of strength; in my view, they are shows of fragility. When you have to ship people in from outside to cause intimidation in a constituency, there is nothing strong about it.