Tory leader calls for tough stance on IRA

British Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith today called on Tony Blair to take a tough stance on IRA disarmament and consider throwing Sinn Fein out of its offices at Westminster following the collapse of devolution in Northern Ireland.

Mr Smith, speaking at the Ulster Unionist Party annual conference in Derry, said he was “exasperated” by British government concessions to republicans – from the release of prisoners, failure to insist on decommissioning in return, and the facilities provided to Sinn Fein MPs who refuse to take their seats in the House of Commons.

“The government must accept that the one-sided and unnecessary concessions such as Sinn Fein’s special status at Westminster have undermined previous tough words,” he said.

Mr Duncan Smith declared: “In the light of Sinn Fein’s behaviour at Stormont, this special status must be reviewed.

“Along with the breaches of the ceasefire this has done more than anything to give the impression that the [peace] process is a one-way street and to undermine confidence in it.

“It is time to restore the balance to the process. It is time that rewards follow performance and that breaches are properly sanctioned.”

It was time to end the “drip feed of one-sided concessions” such as further reforms to an already “demoralised and under-resourced” police service that Ulster Secretary John Reid planned to introduce in the autumn, he said.

In the first address by a Tory leader to the Ulster Unionist conference in decades – and his first return to Derry since he served there as an officer with the Scots Guards in the mid-1970s, Mr Duncan Smith focused on republicans’ wrong doing and said it was time for an unequivocal declaration the war was over.

It was time to insist all parties operated on a level playing field and under the same rules, he said.

That meant the same threshold for participation in the government of Northern Ireland as the Taoiseach insisted on in Dublin.

Bertie Ahern said before the recent general election there would be no place in government for Sinn Fein while the IRA existed.

What was now needed was a comprehensive agreement on the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement involving strict linkages and a clear timetable, two things which, he said, the British and Irish governments had run away from until now.

“We will need genuine toughness in the leadership of the process. It means an end to private armies and the cancer of paramilitarism. It means decommissioning and disbandment. It means an unequivocal declaration that the war is over,” said Mr Duncan Smith.