Anti-drugs group denies ‘vigilante’ claims
An anti-drugs pressure group which operates in north Belfast has denied allegations that it is behind an increase in vigilante attacks linked to paramilitaries.
Ardoyne based Concerned Families Against Drugs has rejected the claims made in the Independent Monitoring Commission’s latest report into paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland.
“We’re an open community group who don’t engage in any illegal activity and to date no-one from the IMC has contacted our group”, Martin Og Meehan, of Concerned Families Against Drugs, told UTV.
‘Radical’
Mr Meehan described the north Belfast group as “radical”, but said no-one had ever been injured as a result of its activity.
“We’re one-year-old and we have taken more drugs out of the community than the PSNI have.”
“We’re now going to be targeted for arrest and imprisonment,” he told UTV.
“We’re challenging the IMC to produce evidence of this illegal activity.”
In its latest report published on Wednesday, the IMC stated: “We note that a factor behind the increase in the number of attacks in some nationalist areas appears to have been the growth of vigilante organisations which claim to want to “clean up” (their term) anti-social behaviour.
“Two such groupings are Concerned Families Against Drugs in Belfast and Republican Action Against Drugs in Derry.”
The report alleges both organisations have undertaken attacks, including some involving the use of pipe-bombs.
In a web-blog maintained by CFAD, the pressure group details raids it claims have been carried out by its members on property alleged to belong to those involved in the cultivation, sale or supply of illegal drugs.
The group also orchestrates action against alleged drug dealers, including the use of letters “naming and shaming” individuals to the local community.
The group says it passes on the drugs it seizes to a local priest, who then contacts the PSNI.
In its most recent post, CFAD strongly denied “the scurrilous allegations levelled at our community group by the NON-Independent Monitoring Commission and so-called Sinn Fein ‘community workers’ who clearly do nothing to seriously try and combat the scourge of drugs and related crime in our areas.”
It added: “These same inactivists call on our beleaguered communities to support the RUC/PSNI who readily recruit the suppliers and dealers of death and destruction”.
