Trimble urges IRA men to join Sinn Féin to save peace process
With the power-sharing government lurching into crisis after the Ulster Unionist leader threatened to quit the Stormont administration, he suggested Sinn Féin take in more Provisional volunteers.
Mr Trimble's party has set a January 18 deadline for republicans to guarantee the IRA will be disbanded.
If he is not satisfied of their commitment to democracy he has vowed to impose tough sanctions on Sinn Féin and take his Ulster Unionists out of the Northern Ireland Executive.
Insisting a complete disintegration of the IRA could be done within the four-month time-frame, he claimed this could be done in a number of ways.
He suggested: "It could be that the people in the IRA move unequivocally into Sinn Féin and devote themselves purely to democratic means." The new threat to the peace process emerged following a crunch meeting of the UUP's 860-strong ruling council in Belfast on Saturday.
Mr Trimble's party has also vowed to end its involvement in meetings of the North South Ministerial Council involving Sinn Féin ministers.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams denounced the plan as a "wrecker's charter."
With the real prospect of Northern Ireland's government collapsing early in the New Year, the British and Irish Governments have pencilled in urgent talks. Secretary of State John Reid is also to organise meetings with all the pro-Good Friday Agreement parties in a bid to save the peace process.
Dr Reid yesterday urged all sides to remember what is at stake.
He said: "It doesn't surprise me that in a huge historic project like this the matter of trust and reassurance will continually raise itself.
"I just hope that everyone will remember not only what they need for their side of the community, but what we would all lose if this process falters." Unionist confidence has been drained by allegations the IRA has been training left-wing Colombian terrorists, broke into Special Branch offices at Castlereagh police station, and has been orchestrating sectarian street violence in Belfast.
Mr Trimble told the BBC's On the Record that it was ongoing paramilitary violence on the streets of Belfast and the failure of both republican and loyalist terror organisations to disarm fully which has left the political institutions in peril.
He insisted there was no reason why decommissioning couldn't be completed by January 18 and claimed Mr Adams should have been preparing the IRA for the "inevitable."
"If he has, there isn't a problem. If he hasn't, obviously there's a problem," the UUP chief said.
"This process cannot be sustained as things stand at the moment."
Mr Trimble claimed the public now thought they had been fooled because of the ongoing violence and republicans' failure to deliver on its side of the bargain.
"People believe there's never going to be change for the better," he said.
"It's now up to the people who have been dragging their feet to show it's going to succeed." Earlier, a hardline Ulster Unionist Party MP had predicted that Sinn Féin would fail the peace test.
South Antrim MP David Burnside insisted republicans have got off lightly ever since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998.
Turning to the New Year deadline, he claimed: "I think they are going to lie their way through it, but it's not good enough.
"That con-job doesn't wash any longer and unionists aren't prepared to continue with an all-inclusive executive."
Meanwhile, anti-agreement Ulster Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson said last night the IRA "must disappear" before his party would consider sharing power with Sinn Féin in the future.
Mr Donaldson said the IRA's organisation, structure, weapons and threat must all go.
"We have adopted the policy first set out by Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, when he said that he would not have Sinn Féin in his government until the IRA had disbanded and we now have the same policy as Fianna Fáil."
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