IRA decommissioning - Loyalist groups must follow suit

It would appear that Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness may not have done the IRA’s final act of decommissioning justice in heralding it as merely “historic”.

In the end, the two clergymen who witnessed it described it as a development which would become “a benchmark for the resolution for political conflicts everywhere”.

Unfortunately, another clergyman, DUP leader Ian Paisley, is unlikely to consider in that light the declaration from General John de Chastelain, chairman of the International Commission on Decommissioning, that the IRA had abandoned arms.