Loyalists 'make death threat' over flag

The elderly mother of a nationalist politician was threatened with death when she complained about loyalists putting flags up outside her home, it was claimed today.

SDLP politician Danny O’Connor, a member of the local District Policing Partnership in Larne, Co Antrim, said known UDA men had made the threats and that his mother was taken to hospital following the confrontation.

Mr O’Connor said: “Late on Monday evening a group of known UDA men hung an Ulster flag on a pole directly in front of my house.

“When my mother challenged them, she was verbally abused and explicitly threatened with death.”

He said she had been taken to hospital on the advice of a police patrol, but that the same officers had done nothing about removing the flag.

Flags have gone up all over Northern Ireland in advance of next week’s annual July 12 Orange parades, most in loyalist areas, but some, as in this case, in mixed areas.

Mr O’Connor accused police of conducting a policy of appeasement and negotiation with the UDA while failing to provide protection for nationalists.

Flags were not merely expressions of culture when hung by paramilitaries. “They are instruments of intimidation hung illegally on public property which is paid for by nationalists as well as unionists.

“The purpose of intimidation can hardly be denied when the people hanging the flags told my mother they would put her in the graveyard,” said Mr O’Connor.

A spokesman for the PSNI said police in Larne had been engaged for several months with community representatives on both sides in the town in an effort to resolve the flags issue.

He said as recently as last week a senior officer had met Mr O’Connor and others and advised them that where his officers came upon anyone erecting paramilitary flags, the officers would act.

“This was not the case last night. Officers responded to an incident to find that an Ulster flag had been erected. Police have no powers to remove non-paramilitary flags,” he added.