Northern Ireland Secretary Mr Peter Mandelson today again appealled to the IRA to engage with the international decommissioning body headed by Gen John de Chastelain and work towards putting its weapons verifiably beyond use.
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| Mr Mandelson in fresh appeal to IRA over weapons |
"If you do we won't have either the reality or the allegations that have arisen this morning," he told the IRA.
Mr Mandelson refused to be drawn on a newspaper report today the Provisional IRA had broken its ceasefire and been involved in a bomb attack on the home of a police officer.
"I have absolutely no such information whatsoever," said Mr Mandelson, but he added that if the RUC had anything to say to him about it it would do so.
But he said if there was not collusion or co-ordination but instead dissident republicans were able to draw on stockpiles of munitions in IRA dumps that would "simply point up the need for decommissioning".
He added: "Northern Ireland is simply awash with arms and devices of one sort or another. We will never have a permanent and stable peace and the sort of civic society which most of us want to achieve while the issue of arms is not addressed."
In a seperate development the SDLP spokesman on policing responded to Mr Mandelson's call to the party to take seats on the new Northern Ireland Police Board, saying while there had been a lot of progress on reform there had to be more before the SDLP could join the board.
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Assembly member Alex Attwood said: "If the SDLP goes onto the Policing Board and the nationalist/republican community does not go into the policing service then we would have a worse outcome than many others. So the real issue is let's get the outstanding issues right now so that people have what they want which is proper policing."
Meanwhile Mr Gary McMichael, leader of the Ulster Democratic Party, warned unionists could walk away from implementing policing reforms if there were more concessions to nationalists.
"I think the peace process is in trouble unless we can find ways of rebuilding confidence in it within the unionist community," he said.
PA