The Church of Ireland Bishop of Connor, the Right Rev Alan Harper, has spoken out about the activities of paramilitaries in loyalist north and west Belfast.
Speaking directly to the paramilitary leadership in his presidential address to the Connor diocesan synod at Lisburn, Co Antrim, yesterday, he said: "You are currently destroying, and will ultimately completely destroy, the communities to which you belong, unless you take a different course.
"You are consuming your own people. You are yourselves the greatest threat of all to the people you call your own," he said.
He asked them "to consider the long-term moral effects of the activities that you engage in upon your own communities.
"Whether you like it or not, you are role models for the young people, and especially the young men, growing up in your midst. What message does it send when young men and young women are forced to conclude that the only way to 'make it' where they live is through violence, intimidation and racketeering?"
He noted that it was not always this way. "When your organisations were born, the original motivation was to protect, not exploit and destroy, the communities in which you live.
"Your communities have been desensitised, even dehumanised, by what they continue to experience at your hands. Because you have demonstrated a genuine capacity for leadership, it is tragic that you should use that ability for criminal ends.
"You have both the capacity and the opportunity to enrich rather than impoverish the communities to which you belong. You are rooted in those communities: they are your people, and you are theirs. You can do what outsiders so often cannot do, motivate and lead and inspire from within."
He observed that perhaps the only other coherent social groups rooted in local communities were the churches. "We belong there also: we are bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh," he said.
If the paramilitaries "put away the trappings and the ethics of the gun and the baseball bat", they would find that the churches, which were committed to helping communities rebuild, "would welcome the energy and leadership you could bring to a common task," he said.