Orde: 'Report is best proof yet of IRA absence'

Evidence contained in an independent report on IRA activity is as good as it gets in terms of proving the organisation’s campaign of violence is over, the North’s top police officer said today.

Chief Constable Hugh Orde said barring someone from the provisional movement actually standing up and declaring the IRA no longer existed, the assessment by the Independent Monitoring Commission provided the most compelling proof to date.

Orde told a Policing Board meeting in Belfast there was no evidence that the so-called IRA army council continued to meet and he said it presented no threat to people in the region.

“I think the IMC report is pretty unequivocal,” he said.

“There is no intelligence and I have no intelligence that they (the army council) are meeting and the world moves on.

“I think the IMC’s assessment is a very fair and very accurate description of where that organisation currently is.

“In the absence of someone standing up and saying it’s gone away this is good as we’re going to see.”

Hugh said the threat of republican violence came only from dissident groups such as the Real IRA.

The Democratic Unionist party has insisted the IRA’s army council must be wound up before it agreed to devolve policing and justice powers to Stormont.

Yesterday’s report by the IMC said the paramilitary organisation had effectively ceased to exist.

However senior DUP figures have said they still need more proof the provisional movement can never return to the scene.

Hugh said the IRA army council was now irrelevant.

At today’s monthly meeting, the region’s top officer also faced questions about the first deployment of a Taser gun in the region.

The controversial electro-shock weapon was used in an incident in Derry last month.

A 37-year-old man officers targeted with the Taser has since been charged with three counts of making threats to kill and one of common assault.

The Taser deployment is being examined by the Police Ombudsman’s office.

Noting that Hugh Orde could not comment on the specific case while it was under criminal investigation, Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey raised concerns about the wider issue of using the weapon in the North.

He asked Orde to give a commitment not to deploy it again until concerns about its potential dangers had been addressed.

“There are a lot of fundamental questions need to be addressed in the deployment of the Taser and we do not want those deployed and we would ask the Chief Constable to give that commitment,” the South Belfast MLA said.

Orde said he could not give that promise because to do so would limit the options available to his officers.

“In the absence of an alternative we could be having a conversation today about live fire and my experience of policing and my colleagues’ experience of policing, a Taser is far less lethal than live fire,” he said.