Ulster Unionist MLA Tom Elliott has asked if the DUP was hoodwinked over IRA decommissioning.
Speaking after comments by Martti Ahtisaari, a member of the de Chastelain team which oversaw the decommissioning process, to the effect that not all IRA weapons were destroyed, Mr Elliott said:
“One of the DUP’s main reasons for doing a deal with Sinn Fein was that they had secured complete IRA decommissioning.
Indeed in 2013 Peter Robinson said, “our insistence on the introduction of accountability, the decommissioning of weapons, the ending of paramilitary and criminal activity… were the essential ingredients for stable and lasting structures.”
Yesterday’s comments of admission by Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland who jointly inspected the IRA weapons dumps as part of the de Chastelain team should make very uncomfortable reading for the DUP, but is also of concern for the wider community.
The former Finnish President said “in a society that has been in a war... there are so many arms in that society that you can never have a situation anywhere in the world where all the arms will disappear."
His comments are of particular relevance given the amount of “old stock”, including semtex, which has been turning up in the hands of republican terrorists in recent months and used in attacks against the Police and the wider community.
When one recalls the comments of the previous DUP Leader on 26 September 2005 about the completion of the decommissioning process:
“Instead of openness there was the cunning tactics of cover-up and a complete failure from General John de Chastelain to deal with the vital numerics of decommissioning. We do not know how many guns, ammunition and explosives were decommissioned nor do we know how the decommissioning was carried out….
The fact remains that the promise made by the Prime Minister, that decommissioning must be transparent and verifiable and must satisfy everyone was broken. There were no photographs, no detailed inventory and no detail of the destruction of these arms. To describe today’s act as being transparent would be the falsehood of the century.”
Yet what changed for the DUP to enter Government? Was it on that basis of this “falsehood” that Ian Paisley and the DUP installed Sinn Fein in the Deputy First Minister’s office?”