Peace has suffered massive damage, admits Murphy
Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy today said the peace process had been “very seriously damaged” by the events of the past weeks.
He said the onus was now on Sinn Féin and the IRA to stop criminality.
Mr Murphy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that penalties he could impose would be symbolic because the Northern Ireland Assembly was not sitting.
“Nothing, of course, can compensate for people who are murdered, nothing can really compensate for all the issues… but all that remains to us at the moment, because of the absence of the assembly which sits in Northern Ireland, is to consider financial sanctions,” he said.
Mr Murphy declined to say if the British government believed Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were on the IRA army council.
“We have never got into names as a government,” he said. “What we have always said is that Sinn Féin and the IRA are inextricably linked, that they are both sides of a coin, as it were, and clearly if there is a perception...there is this linkage, then I think the onus again rests upon the leadership of the republican movement to make themselves very clear on this.”
