World awaits decommissioning confirmation

The IRA has destroyed all the weapons used to run its campaign in the North for more than 30 years, the world will be told today.

After scrutinising the IRA putting their arms dumps beyond use, decommissioning chief General John de Chastelain is to brief Dublin and London on an unprecedented move that looks set to transform the peace process.

More than a decade after declaring its first ceasefire, the IRA appears to have completely abandoned the armed struggle – and before its goal of all-Ireland unity has been achieved.

Details of the disarmament will be revealed today during an intense and carefully choreographed sequence of statements, sources close to the process confirmed.

As well as disclosure from the three-man de Chastelain team, both the IRA and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams will go public on the decision to scrap a huge arsenal of IRA guns and explosives.

Two independent church witnesses, Father Alex Reid, the Redemptorist priest who helped broker secret peace talks between republicans and the British government, and former Methodist President Harold Good, are also expected to announce what they saw.

Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness said: “I am confident that Monday will bring the final chapter on the issue of IRA arms.

“Of course, this is about more than arms. It is about reviving the peace process, it is about the future of Ireland.

“I believe that Ireland stands on the cusp of a truly historic advance and I hope that people across the island will respond positively in the time ahead.”

The church men’s involvement may not, however, be enough to satisfy Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists that the paramilitary organisation has gone out of business for good and allow a revival of the power-sharing Executive at Stormont that was suspended over alleged IRA espionage.

The DUP had wanted their own clergyman involved and were demanding photographic proof of decommissioning – a step republicans said they were not prepared to take.

Senior party representative Jeffrey Donaldson cast doubt over the significance of the announcement and questioned the credibility of the ICD.

He said: “In the past, decommissioning as a process has been shrouded in secrecy and if we are to increase public confidence in the process then we want it to be more transparent.

“Now I don’t think we are going to get that level of transparency and I think that it most unfortunate. People want to see what has happened. They say seeing is believing.

“Unfortunately in the past the Commission has proved by its reports that it lacks credibility and that is the problem.”