Visit republican area, Sinn Fein tells Trimble

Sinn Fein today urged Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble to visit a nationalist community in east Belfast.

Sinn Fein national chairman Mitchel McLaughlin extended the invitation again to Mr Trimble, who is in South Africa for the Earth Summit, after the Stormont First Minister claimed republican paramilitaries had stoked sectarian tensions in the city for political gain but had lost control of the situation.

Mr Trimble, who last Wednesday visited Cluan Place on the loyalist side of the sectarian interface in east Belfast, alleged that republicans had stirred up tensions in a bid to undermine the police and put pressure on the rival nationalist SDLP, which last year endorsed Northern Ireland’s new policing structures.

Mr McLaughlin denied the claims, and accused loyalist paramilitaries of initiating the violence along flashpoint areas and of engaging in a pogrom against Catholics.

Mr Trimble said yesterday: "While there is violence coming from loyalist paramilitaries and we have criticised that, the basic underlying problem is the fact that republican paramilitaries decided to hot up the interfaces this summer and use it as a political tool to attack the new policing arrangements and SDLP participation on the Policing Board.

"It was a cynical political manoeuvre. It has backfired on them.

"As they have discovered in the past, and as we all know, once you start to stoke up violence, you cannot control it.

"But the republican leadership should not have gone down this course."

The First Minister welcomed Assistant Chief Constable Alan McQuillan’s statement on Thursday that the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force and the Provisional IRA had fuelled the clashes in east Belfast.

He defended his decision to visit the loyalist side of the Short Strand flashpoint, and nationalist Deputy First Minister Mark Durkan’s decision earlier this year to go to the other side, saying they had to take security advice.

But Mr McLaughlin said Mr Trimble would have not been invited to visit Short Strand if it was believed he would come to any harm.

The Foyle Assembly member said: "During the interview David Trimble acknowledged he does not actually know what is happening on the nationalist and republican side of the interfaces when he said he is depending upon police reports.

"He is the leader of the Unionist Party. He is the First Minister of the power-sharing executive and yet he is prepared, despite the history of bad policing in this country, to listen to their second-hand reports.

"There is an open invitation for him to come to Short Strand.

"Sinn Fein would not be associated with that invitation if we believed there was any possibility of a threat to him. We want him to get a true perception of the dreadful nightly intimidation experienced by that community."