Responding to Peter Robinson’s piece in today’s Belfast Telegraph Jim Allister said:
“It has been obvious for some time that the DUP are mad keen to get back to business as usual with Sinn Fein/IRA. In fact, there was no desire to break it off in the first place. The farce of repeated resignations and reappointments were perhaps the only cases in history of resignations designed specifically to keep a government afloat rather than Ministers resigning on principle because they disagreed with government policy.
“It is clear from his comments this morning that Peter Robinson is quite prepared to go back into government with Republicans regardless of the facts that:
- The IRA still exists;
- The IRA is still armed and
- The IRA is still prepared to kill if they believe it will serve their purposes to do so.
“In his comments Mr Robinson interestingly uses the present tense when talking about IRA activity. Note that he said “if the report indicates the IRA is involved in or preparing for terrorist activity…”. Does that mean that if the IRA only killed someone in August and there isn’t any information that they intend to kill anyone else at the moment he is quite prepared to continue in partnership with their political wing? The DUP have form in this kind of doublespeak. They promised us that they would resign from the Executive one day and the very next claimed that didn’t mean that all there Ministers would resign. Later we learned that it also didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be back in office a few days later!
“In 2007 the DUP claimed to have made a “total end to IRA paramilitary activity a condition of holding office” and claimed “all paramilitary and criminal activity and terrorist structures must be abandoned before Sinn Fein is admitted to Government.”
“Eight years later none of that has happened and the DUP again find themselves in the unenviable position of seeking to make excuses for continuing their partnership with an armed and active IRA.
“TUV looks forward to an election which will allow the people to pass their verdict on this approach.”