Ahern 'confident' IRA will dump arms

Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern today said he was confident the IRA would carry out a full and complete decommissioning of its arsenal.

There is a growing belief that the paramilitary organisation are about to carry out an unprecedented act of decommissioning, with Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams saying it was going to honour its commitment to dump its arms in the “near future“.

Mr Ahern, who met Sinn Féin at Government Buildings last Friday, said he was confident the IRA would decommission all its weapons.

“From everything that I’ve heard and from everything I’ve understood from our own security services, the answer to that question is yes.”

However, he cautioned against the speculation about the timing of the move.

“I think it’s best that we wait until General John De Chastelain (head of the International Commission on Decommissioning) comes forward with his report, hopefully in the near future and that it’s a clear report and that it will give the general public and the wider community in Northern Ireland the confidence to know that the IRA have in fact gone off the scene and that least in the nationalist/republican section of the community, there will be no more paramilitarism.”

An IRA statement in July signalled the end of the armed struggle.

Mr Ahern, speaking on RTE’s This Week programme, said the focus would have to shift to loyalist paramilitarism.

He said he did not expect the DUP and other unionist parties to be dancing in the aisles when IRA decommissioning began.

He added it was unlikely that power sharing would resume quickly even if the International Monitoring Commission found that the IRA had ceased activity in its report next January.

“But we would expect that the discussions would start immediately with a view to setting up the institutions required by the people in the vote on the Good Friday Agreement as soon as possible,” he said.

Following Sinn Féin’s rally for Irish unity in Dublin yesterday, the party’s chief negotiator Martin McGuinness is due to travel to Washington on Tuesday, further intensifying speculation that IRA disarmament is imminent.