Trimble tells IRA: End love affair with the gun

There’s little point in proceeding with multi-party talks in Northern Ireland if the IRA refuses to address the need for it to give up all paramilitary activity, Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, insisted tonight.

In a hard-hitting statement issued after a meeting in Downing Street with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, Mr Trimble warned that Unionist patience had been “exhausted”.

And he also argued that people in Northern Ireland wanted the Republican Movement to end its “love affair with the gun”.

The Upper Bann MP, who was accompanied at the meeting by former Stormont ministers, Sir Reg Empey and Michael McGimpsey and North Down MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon, said: “Our discussions served to underline the need to maintain pressure on republicans to undertake ’acts of completion’.

“We are not seeking great-sounding words or gestures, but finality.

“The Ulster Unionist Party, indeed, all the people of Northern Ireland, want to know that the Republican Movement have put up the shutters, have gone out of business, have ended their love affair with the gun.”