Northern Secretary Peter Hain today challenged loyalist paramilitaries to follow the political path or face the full rigour of the law.
They appeared to have degenerated into Mafia organisations, he said, and would not be tolerated.
Peter Hain
Hitting out at the recent violence in Belfast, he said it was doubly shocking because people had got used to the normality which had returned to most parts of the North.
Loyalist anger boiled over into three days of serious street violence last week, which was sparked by a controversial Orange Order march.
The IRA is widely expected to be ready to finally decommission in the near future. A meeting between Sinn Fein and the Government in Dublin on Friday, as well as a keynote speech due on Saturday are seen as signs that a move is imminient.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has just returned from the US where he briefed politicians and Irish-American supporters on progress in the peace process. He has also met with the eight republican prisoners in Castlerea Jail yesterday.
Mr Hain told the paramilitaries bluntly that violence was wrong and would achieve them nothing. In a wide-ranging keynote address in Belfast, he said he had taken on board the grievances expressed to him about the unionist community and was appointing political development minister David Hanson to help address social disadvantage, poverty and exclusion.
He told loyalists: "Violence is wrong from wherever it comes, it does not pay and the recent violence has imposed a heavy cost on the communities in which it was carried out."
He said: "The choice for loyalist paramilitaries is clear: play the political role that you claim as your motive, face the rigour of the law as the Mafia organisations into which you seem to be degenerated.
"You will not be allowed to terrorise your own community".
In a message to those former paramilitaries who wanted to move forward to build a better Northern Ireland, he said: "Leave violence and criminality behind and join the rest of us who want to create a new prosperous Northern Ireland."
He said the Belfast Agreement was something unionists should not be afraid of. It had, for the first time, enshrined in law that Northern Ireland would remain a part of the UK until or unless the majority wanted otherwise.
Mr Hain said he accepted there were unionists who were deeply suspicious of the way the agreement was working out, partly because movement on IRA decommissioning and the ending of paramilitary activity had been so slow.
Mr Hain said that while violence would achieve nothing - that was why the IRA had given up its campaign - he did accept there was a sense of frustration and anger within unionism which had been "expressed very forcibly" to to him by unionist leaders the Rev Ian Paisley and Sir Reg Empey.
PA