Paisley must go - Allister
10 October 2009
When Ian Paisley Junior was exposed as having approved the secondment of PSNI officers to help Gaddafi, he spun a web of defence which included the spectacular claim that in fact the officers were intelligence gathering. In his pitiful ‘nudge,nudge/wink,wink’, 'if you knew, what I knew' excuse he said: "In an adult world you don't have to be a genius to work out why it would be useful to have a senior officer, who has got intelligence skills, to look at Libya and to examine that country and to look at the facts that surround that country and to bring that information back to us."
Believing such to be transparent nonsense TUV Leader Jim Allister sought clarification from the Chairman of the Policing Board if there was any truth in Mr Paisley’s wild suggestion. Mr Barry Gilligan in a written response has very explicitly said of seconded officers, “they do not engage in any sort of information gathering on overseas deployments”.
Commenting Mr Allister said: “Ian Paisley Junior was not only flushed out by his own Deputy Leader, Nigel Dodds MP as approving help for Gaddafi, but now he has been caught out making up fairy stories to cover his tracks. His suggestion that the PSNI officers were intelligence gathering in Libya stands exposed as fatuous nonsense. So why did he spin this web of deceit?
"I call on him not just to publicly apologise for his misleading assertion but to resign from the Policing Board as his judgement stands exposed as so deficient as to render him unfit to serve there. If he doesn’t go voluntarily, then his party should remove him. Granted standards of probity on the Policing Board are low, with its membership including a convicted bank robber and convicted bomber, but we are entitled to expect unionist representatives to conduct themselves properly.”
