Sinn Féin signals major IRA arms move within days
A delegation led by Gerry Adams met the Government in Dublin yesterday for the first formal meeting since January. The meeting gave public confirmation that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and his senior ministers believe the IRA’s final act of decommissioning is imminent and that the Provisionals have severed all links with criminality.
Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said he accepted what the Sinn Féin delegation had told him - that decommissioning would happen very soon and that it would be significant. He added ending links with criminality was the “bedrock” of progress.
Justice Minister Michael McDowell, significantly, said he had seen no “disturbing signs” that the IRA was not living up to its July 28 statement ending all activities.
The discernibly upbeat mood of yesterday’s meeting came at the end of a week where Sinn Féin has prepared the ground for decommissioning. It will culminate today when Mr Adams will make a major speech at a Make Partition History rally in Dublin.
Though the party refused to divulge the timing of the announcement, it looks certain to take place within the next seven days.
“We believe that we are all on the cusp of a future which allows those of us who want to, to see democratic and peaceful structures in place,” Mr Adams said. The party’s chief negotiator Martin McGuinness added: “We are on the threshold of something very important.”
SF’s future participation in policing, the Colombia Three case, the Northern Bank raid, and the situations facing the families of two murder victims, Joe Rafferty and Robert McCartney, were also brought up.
Meanwhile, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte last night criticised Sinn Féin’s Rally for Irish Unity over its insensitivity to deepening sectarian divisions.
In a speech in Co Louth, which was also criticised unionists, he said that SF had “said and done nothing to demonstrate any awareness of the crisis around them - the ‘cantonisation’ or even ‘Balkanisation’ of Northern Ireland”.
