IMC press conference: A more definitive ruling on the ending of the IRA's campaign will not be taken by the Independent Monitoring Commission until its next report is issued in January, the body has declared.
Describing the IRA's recent actions as "potentially very significant", IMC member Dick Kerr warned that the IRA had "modulated" downwards its violence before.
Dissident republicans were still the "most committed" to terrorism, though loyalist paramilitaries - now largely purely criminal gangs - were the most likely to commit violence.
Loyalist punishment beatings, said Mr Kerr, a former deputy director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, were up by 38 per cent this year, while the numbers of such beatings by the IRA were down by 40 per cent, he told a press conference in Dublin yesterday afternoon.
The four-strong independent body, chaired by the former Alliance Party leader, Lord Alderdice, repeatedly emphasised that their report concentrated equally on loyalist paramilitaries as well as the IRA.
While the IRA's paramilitary activity has been scaled down, Lord Alderdice said the organisation still "exiled" some people to stay out of Northern Ireland, or else face death if they returned home without permission.
Responding to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern's use of the phrase "clean bill of health", Lord Alderdice cautioned against its use, given that the IRA is still in existence.
"I've cautioned people against the use of the term 'clean bill of health'," he said. "I'm a doctor and I genuinely think it is ill-advised to give anybody a clean bill of health because they sometimes go straight out the door and collapse on you. We will monitor things and give the evidence as we see it and others must then make their judgment on what that means for the future."
Besides Lord Alderdice and Mr Kerr, the other members of the commission are former Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner John Grieve, and the former secretary of the Department of Justice, Joe Brosnan.
The IMC repeatedly rejected suggestions that the British government had snubbed it by ignoring some of its recommendations, and, instead, deciding to lift financial penalties on Sinn Féin.
Mr Grieve said they were not subject to influence from the British government: "I feel under absolutely no political pressure at all. I feel under pressure to myself to get as much evidence as possible and to prepare the best possible report," Mr Grieve said.
However, Lord Alderdice accepted that there was "a divergence of positions" adopted by the IMC and the British government. "It certainly raises questions about those people who believe that we were not independent because quite clearly we have said things that come out of our following of the evidence."
