Official moves to bring SF in from cold

DUBLIN and London last night moved swiftly to bring Sinn Féin in from the cold, despite ceasefire observers giving the IRA’s claims of abandoning violence and crime only a limited endorsement.

The Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) said signs the organisation had moved away from the armed struggle were “encouraging”.

However, the commissioners admitted their evidence was “limited” as five of the six months covered by the report came before the IRA announced its total cessation of activity at the end of July.

The study drew an immediate and warm response from the Irish and British Governments. Northern Secretary Peter Hain insisted there had been “positive signs of progress”. Downing Street lifted the ban on Sinn Féin receiving financial allowances for its elected representatives to the suspended Northern Assembly which was imposed after the €39 million Belfast bank robbery last December.

A similar sanction against the party’s Westminster MPs is also expected to be ended - handing Sinn Féin a financial windfall amounting to around €750,000.

However, commission chairman Lord Alderdice said the decision went against the wishes of the IMC. “While we do feel that something very significant happened potentially in the IRA statement and indeed in the decommissioning which was reported on, we felt it was too early to make a definitive judgment on the question of returning public funds to Sinn Féin at this time,” he said.

Referring to the IMC’s warning that “criminality is the biggest long-term threat to the rule of law in Northern Ireland”, Mr Hain demanded the IRA sever their links to gangsterism.

“The republican movement needs to accept there is still a big problem with crime and just as it has turned its back on paramilitary activity it must on do so on criminality,” he said. The Northern Secretary said the next report in January was now crucial.

“It is essential that the IMC, as they state, are able to observe ‘cumulative changes in behaviour over a more sustained period of time’,” he added.

Yesterday’s report, the seventh by the IMC, said in the period before the July statement the Provisionals had recruited new members and trained them in the use of weapons, but they had no evidence of such activity after the IRA’s July 28 announcement.

The IMC also stated the Provisionals were responsible for a number of attacks over the six-month period under review, including one in August when an IRA member was “disciplined”.

The report revealed that in the six months up to the end of August loyalists were responsible for much more violence than republicans.

At the end of last month the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) said the Provisional IRA had disposed of all of its arms.