Greens seek collusion admission from Blair

The British government should come clean on security force collusion with paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, the Green …

The British government should come clean on security force collusion with paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, the Green Party said today.

In their joint submission to the review of the Belfast Agreement, the party organisation on both sides of the Border argued that if Mr Tony Blair's government faced up to the full extent of collusion, it would help Northern Ireland shake off its bloody past.

With London still facing demands to hold a public inquiry into alleged collusion in the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, the party argued: "Lethal force was an integral part of the state's evolving policy of conflict management, along with emergency legislation and the use of the legal process.

"We believe that the normalisation agenda agreed by the two governments, and which is to be the subject of the Independent Monitoring Commission's second report, should include actions by the British Government to come clean on their own involvement in the sponsorship of and collusion with unionist and republican operations.

READ MORE

"Assurances should be forthcoming regarding the state's commitment to dismantling the infrastructure of collusion."

The document, published in Belfast today by Mr Trevor Sargent and his Northern counterpart Mr John Barry, also expressed concern about the reliance of the Independent Monitoring Commission on agencies involved in collusion during the Troubles and intelligence-gathering in the Iraq war.

The Greens also called for:

Credible and transparent acts of paramilitary disarmament as part of a final sequence of gestures on all sides to restore devolution at Stormont.

Sinn Féin to stop "playing party politics" with policing and join Northern Ireland's Policing Board.

The repeal by the British government of the 1701 Act of Settlement, which forbids a Catholic from ever becoming King or Queen.

The recall of the Assembly and the temporary appointment of a team of commissioners to run government departments in the event of an initial failure to set up a power-sharing executive.

Changes to the Assembly voting system, with a combination of proportional representation, single transferable vote and top-up in the elections to Stormont; proportional representation in elections for committee chairs and deputy chairs; proportional representation in the election of ministers; multi-optional decision making to ensure sufficient consensus and an end to the requirement on MLAs to designate themselves as unionist, nationalist or other.