Jim Allister: DUP leader is only in post because IRA murder has been ignored

With IRA murder in August causing the Stormont institutions to teeter on the brink of collapse and with Arlene Foster then saying the IRA is inextricably linked to Sinn Fein, the truth is that Arlene Foster is only first minister today because she and her party swept that murder under the carpet.

The government panel could not have been clearer: the IRA still exists, still has arms, retains its Army Council, controlling both the IRA and Sinn Fein.

Yet, the response of the DUP was to return to business as usual with IRA/Sinn Fein.

Thus, the uncomfortable and unpalatable truth is that Mrs Foster and her party choose to turn a blind eye to these realities for the sake of office. Like her predecessors she is first minister courtesy of accepting the continuing existence of the still killing, still armed IRA.

How pitiful that yesterday in a News Letter interview all the first minister could say in response to the failure and con of decommissioning, “You can’t talk about what happened in 2004” .

Why not?

This is what Arlene Foster said in 2004, transparent decommissioning was “absolutely imperative for the survival of any real and meaningful settlement”.

In the same article she went on to say: “It is not difficult for me to recall one of the reasons why I voted against the Belfast Agreement - because the issue of decommissioning of illegal arms held by paramilitaries was so very vague”. (see this letter at newsletter.co.uk for web link to the article).

Clearly, having also abandoned this position for the sake of office, she doesn’t want to talk about the reality that the IRA, which she says is inextricably linked to her partner in government, Sinn Fein, still has access to supposedly decommissioned arms.

This indeed is the price being paid to sustain the “unseemly and immoral sham” that is Belfast Agreement devolution.

Jim Allister, TUV leader