Security Vetting in Northern Ireland: Loyalty, Redress and Citizenship

The notion of 'loyalty' is one that inevitably infuses any system of security vettingset up to establish mechanisms to prevent the disclosure of information whichcould be considered a threat to the security of the state or its citizens. Loyalty,however, is a problematic concept even in jurisdictions with an arguably morehomogenous body politic than Northern Ireland.2 As we shall seek to demonstratein this article, those difficulties are considerably exacerbated in a region where asignificant minority explicitly offer their political allegiance to a differentjurisdiction and where there have been persistent periods of political violenceassociated with that conflict of identity and allegiance.