The dramatic increase in hard drug use in Northern Ireland is a "negative peace dividend" resulting from the breakdown of paramilitary control, International Monitoring Commission (IMC) member Lord Alderdice has warned.
Speaking to The Irish Times in New York where IMC members were involved in a series of meetings, Lord Alderdice, former leader of the Alliance Party, said that there was an inevitable "negative peace dividend" operating in the North as former paramilitaries move into selling drugs.
"For a long time during the Troubles, we had relatively low levels of hardcore drugs in Northern Ireland. It was at the point when the paramilitaries began to move away from the campaigns and into other kinds of things that you got them involved and the drug problems increased very substantially," he said.
He said that the IRA had always been very tough on drugs, partially because drug users were more susceptible to police pressure, but that social control was breaking down.
Fellow IMC member John Grieve said that the stepping down of the IRA's general headquarters staff, described in the latest IMC report, was paradoxically making it more difficult for the organisation to go away.
"There is a contradiction there. You need the structure to oversee the dismantling of the IRA, but if you keep the structure in place, people are going to say: 'Oh look, they are still around,' " he said.
Asked about paramilitary involvement in racketeering, he said he agreed with the Organised Crime Task Force's assessment that there were about 70 to 80 criminal gangs operating in the North, two-thirds of which had paramilitary connections.
He warned that people were "bandying around" figures about the huge levels of racketeering profits and that he had seen figures for all of Britain that suggested that fraud generated from organised crime was costing half a billion pounds a month.
He said that such figures should be viewed cautiously.