EXTRACT FROM A SPEECH BY DUP MEP, JIM ALLISTER, IN BROOKEBOROUGH, COUNTY FERMANAGH ON FRIDAY 7^TH OCTOBER 2005

“So the IRA has decommissioned? Who really knows?  We don’t know how.  We don’t know where.  We certainly don’t know what.  Only a fool would accept the word of the IRA that they have delivered up all.  This is the same IRA that gave its word of non involvement in Columbia, the McCartney murder, the McCabe murder, the Northern Bank robbery…..

Time – a very considerable time – alone will tell.  That process of time is merely lengthened by the government’s refusal to publish an inventory.  There is no statutory bar to such, only the precious sensitivities of Sinn Fein.

Let me be clear there is no reward or quid pro quo from us which opens the doors of government to Sinn Fein in response to decommissioning.  Peter Hain has hopes for January.  Which January, Mr Hain?  Certainly not January 2006!

Criminality still has to be dealt with, in all its forms.  There are many Slab Murphy’s in the Sinn Fein undergrowth.  We will take nothing at face value.  Remember this time last year Sinn Fein leaders were at Leeds Castle espousing peace and democracy while, at the very same time, their movement was methodically planning the Northern Bank robbery.  Such duplicity and endemic entanglement with criminality shows just how far Sinn Fein has to travel before they enter the land of exclusively democratic politics.

IRA  crime must be faced up to and eradicated.  It is not enough for Sinn Fein/IRA to privatise it to satellite operators, just as diversion of arms to dissidents, which may have occurred, does not satisfy the decommissioning test.

So with so much to be done by Sinn Fein/IRA to prove their credentials, “political progress”, as popularly perceived, is far from close.

Let me also remind the Government that the DUP Manifesto of May 2005 said, “Inclusive, mandatory coalition government which includes Sinn Fein under d’Hondt or any other system is out of the question”.  I believed that then, and I still believe it.  So for me it is not just a matter, at some point, of picking up where things were left off in December 04.  The Belfast Agreement has had almost 8 years of failure to its discredit.  Its structures, mechanisms and ideas are the stuff of a failed past.

In my view, if the DUP is to be interested in negotiations leading to devolution, then it manifestly has to be on the basis of a wholly fresh start.”