REACTION:THERE WAS widespread welcome for the decommissioning announcements by loyalist paramilitaries.
President Mary McAleese said it was a very important step in consolidating the peace.
President McAleese and her husband Martin, who has had behind-the-scenes contacts with the UDA and has developed a friendship with one of its senior figures, Jackie McDonald, were praised for their work by Frankie Gallagher of the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG), the political wing of the UDA.
The President said the move “signals a turning away from a culture of conflict towards a culture of good neighbourliness, within Northern Ireland and on the island of Ireland...We encourage those who have not yet completed the process to do so in co-operation with the IICD ,” she added.
First Minister Peter Robinson said the decommissioning by the loyalist paramilitaries not only demonstrated their “commitment to building a peaceful future in Northern Ireland, but also their confidence in the political situation and the security of the union”.
It would also allow police to focus their “counter-terrorism policies on dissident republicans and the threat they pose,” he added.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said the decommissioning was a “positive development” which represented a challenge to other armed groups to get rid of their weapons.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said: “Northern Ireland has now moved closer to achieving the genuinely shared future for which many people have taken risks over the past decades.”
Northern Secretary Shaun Woodward said: “For those who have doubted the political process, it is proof that politics works, and that guns have no place in a normal society.”
The US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said, “The announcements underscore the remarkable progress that has taken place in Northern Ireland over the years... Peter Robinson and other unionist leaders should be commended for their efforts in convincing these groups to take this courageous step.”
The Catholic Primate, Archbishop Sean Brady, said the decommissioning would be particularly welcomed within the Catholic community, which was the target of so much loyalist violence. “I renew my appeal to all paramilitary groups to decommission their weapons completely and to give the people of Northern Ireland, especially the young, further grounds to hope that the peaceful, normal society for which we all yearn is now in sight,” he said.
Methodist minister the Rev Harold Good, who was one of the independent witnesses of IRA decommissioning in 2005, said the loyalist decommissioning marked a huge step forward.
Presbyterian Moderator Dr Stafford Carson hoped the decommissioning would “give everyone the confidence to commit themselves totally to the political process”.
SDLP leader Mark Durkan said the news was very much welcome, and long overdue. “The UDA now have to go some distance and make efforts to follow suit.”
Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey hoped that “all paramilitary groups, as well as destroying their arsenals will, sooner rather than later, dismantle all their structures and disengage from every aspect of criminal- or terrorist-related activity”.
Alliance leader David Ford said the decommissioning lifted a “massive weight off every person in Northern Ireland”.
