The IRA must be brought to heel for the Northern Bank Robbery before any new peace talks, DUP leader Reverend Ian Paisley has warned.
Mr Paisley emerged from meeting Northern Ireland Chief Constable Hugh Orde yesterday more convinced than ever that the Provisional IRA pulled off the £26.5 million heist.
Mr Paisley insisted that a fresh attempt to broker a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Féin was off until cast-iron guarantees are given that all paramilitary guns and crime operations are scrapped for good.
He declared: "There was a golden opportunity which they refused.
"Maybe they saw the gold of the Northern Bank was more precious than the gold of the Assembly."
He added: "The position is that we cannot (now) deal with IRA/ Sinn Féin until they decommission their weapons and give up criminality.
"There's no chance of a deal until the IRA are brought to heel and made amenable to the law. "Seeing is believing that they are going, all criminality must cease, and the people of Northern Ireland must be convinced that they have ceased.
"That will take more than one month to convince us. I would say it will take many months." The raid, on December 20th, the biggest of its kind in British history, came just after a major push to revive the devolved administration at Stormont came agonisingly close to success.
London and Dublin believed they had a deal that would see unionists and republicans work run an Executive together at the Northern Ireland Assembly. But the plan was derailed at the eleventh hour amid IRA resistance to DUP demands requiring photographic proof they had destroyed all their weapons.
Even though republicans have categorically rejected Mr Orde's view that the IRA cleared the vaults at the Northern's Belfast HQ, the Taoiseach Mr Ahern and British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair have accepted his assessment.