IRA 'still involved in criminal acts'
The Irish and British governments were today awaiting the latest independent assessment of IRA activity.
The Independent Monitoring Commission is due to hand over its latest report to both governments tomorrow and they in turn are expected to publish the report mid week.
The report is not expected to give the IRA a clean bill of health.
Ministers in Dublin, London and Belfast had hoped that following the IRA’s announcement last August that they were calling a halt to their activities, the report would confirm they had done so.
However the IMC, chaired by former Stormont Speaker Lord Alderdice, is understood to have agreed with recently-leaked senior police assessments that the IRA was moving in the right direction but was still involved in criminality.
The Commission – its other members are ex-Metropolitan police officer John Grieve, ex CIA deputy director Dick Kerr and former Irish civil servant Joe Bronson – is also expected to state that loyalists paramilitaries are reducing, but have not halted, their illegal activities.
The report is the eighth compiled by the four-man team and was specially commissioned by the two governments last October.
The negative assessment will give the Rev Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party added ammunition to continue to refuse re-entering power-sharing with Sinn Féin.
DUP MP Gregory Campbell reiterated the party stance today.
He has just returned from meetings with Bertie Ahern, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell as part of a Commons Northern Ireland Select Committee investigation into organised crime.
Mr Campbell said it was apparent all three ministers were “still living in the hope that there is going to be devolution in Northern Ireland which includes Sinn Féin in the foreseeable future.”
Mr Campbell said: “I had to make it clear to them in three separate meetings that both they in their country, and we in ours, need to prepare for arrangements while we all ascertain the bona fides of Sinn Féin.
“It is unfortunate that they still harbour hopes of ’restoring the institutions’, even repeating the mantra that people voted for the Agreement eight years ago.”
With little or no sign of that breakthrough immediately, attention is already turning towards the next report of the IMC, which is due in April.
The two governments had hopes of restarting the devolved institutions by the spring, but the DUP and Ulster unionists have both given the governments proposals for an interim stage.
It would involve the Stormont Assembly being recalled but executive functions remaining with the British government or appointed officials.
Mr Blair and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain may go with the option if it was seen as temporary.
Elections to a new assembly must be held by May 2007.
Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Office has confirmed that it continues to be in close contact with community representatives within loyalism.
The confirmation came amid growing hopes that the Ulster Defence Association leadership is nearing a decision to decommission its weapons and stand down in response to the IRA’s final decommissioning last July.
But the UDA wants what it calls confidence building measure financial investment in loyalists areas.
