Roy Beggs MLA, Justice Committee & Cllr Andrew Wilson, MEA PCSP Chairman
The Ulster Unionist Party’s East Antrim MLA, Roy Beggs, has described the advertisement used to spearhead the campaign to stop people funding paramilitary and organised criminal gangs by buying fake or illegal goods, as low key and disappointing in comparison to previous campaigns.
Roy Beggs, who is a member of the Assembly’s Justice committee, and who attended the launch of the campaign today, said:
“Today at Stormont the Justice Minister launched a campaign entitled “I am your money”, aimed at encouraging people to stop funding paramilitary and organised criminal gangs by buying fake or illegal goods.
“The funding of paramilitary and organised criminal gangs needs to be aggressively tackled by the authorities and I therefore welcome any efforts to deal with this issue.
“Given the threats to life and attacks from paramilitaries that have occurred in the past year in East Antrim, I personally believe this advert was not strong enough on the damage being done to individuals and our community.
“I therefore fully endorse the use of the social media campaign #EndTheHarmNI, but I was rather disappointed at what I can only describe as a somewhat low key TV advertisement spearheading the campaign against organised crime.
“Given that the award winning local road safety advertising campaigns have a reputation for being extremely hard-hitting, I would have expected the Department of Justice to follow a similar path for this very important campaign.”
