SF: Unionists want to 'humiliate' IRA
The Rev Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party was today accused seeking to humiliate the IRA with its demand for visible decommissioning of the terror group’s arsenal of weapons.
Sinn Féin chairman Mitchel McLaughlin said the DUP was continually moving the goalposts during the search for a breakthrough agreement which see the return of devolved power-sharing at Stormont.
“We have heard all the stuff about Stephen Spielberg-type coverage of IRA initiatives. Those kind of things are designed to be provocative, and also designed to be counter-effective in terms of any goal of taking arms out of the equation,” he said.
Sinn Féin, he said, had been arguing for a strategy to address the issue of republican weapons. It wanted unionists to address the continued existence and activity of loyalist paramilitary groups instead of putting obstacles up.
“Central to the DUP position, I think, would be a humiliating scenario for republicans that simply isn’t going to happen,” Mr McLaughlin said.
Within unionism there was a fixation with the IRA and a lack of confidence within unionism that it could manage, on the basis of equality with nationalists and republicans, the political process, he argued.
“I think the goalposts get moved all the time, there is an attempt to set the threshold higher than republicans will cope with as an excuse for not actually dealing with the responsibility and the mandate we all received in the most recent election,” said Mr McLaughlin.
The DUP had not shown the kind of political leadership which they had promised after the last Assembly election when they became the main voice of unionism, he said.
And he asked whether the DUP was serious about getting an agreement. “Is it another delaying tactic ? Do they believe that the IRA would step forward to do anything in circumstances where the Good Friday Agreement was diluted.”
People needed to “get real”, he said. “People need to tell those who were posturing, those who were throwing obstacles in the way of bringing back the Executive the facts of life.
“Tell them the realities, tell them to face up to those realities, then I think we can all get on with the business of taking the gun out of Irish politics,” he said.
Speaking on Inside Politics on BBC Radio Ulster he said both the British and Irish governments were satisfied republicans were serious about the conflict resolution process and building the political process.
But pointing to the DUP he said “there are problems when it comes to finding partners, people able to put together a deal and in fact deliver a deal from the unionist side”.
