There was "no chance" of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commando re-engaging with the decommissioning body in Belfast as things stand in the peace process, a leading loyalist said today.
As Sinn Fein's Mr Gerry Adams and Ulster Unionist leader Mr David Trimble held their seventh face-to-face meeting, Progressive Unionist Party leader Mr David Ervine said his community was being frozen out of the talks process.
And while he insisted his party still supported the Belfast Agreement, he said the UVF and Red Hand Commando were beginning to feel they no longer had a stake in it.
Mr Ervine, whose party is linked to the two loyalist groups, said: "For some time these two groups have been watching this process wondering where it will all lead.
"In the main they have been taken to a position of being advocates for the Agreement and provided this agreement was honoured, they were reasonably hopeful that good things would come out of it.
"The difficulty you have is the IRA produces shopping lists for decommissioning like they are doing at the moment.
"The UVF and the Red Hand Commando then ask: 'I thought taking weapons out of this society was for the good of the people and changing this society?'
"Logically you says to them: `Yeah that's right'.
"But then they ask: 'Why aren't the British Government, the Irish Government, any of the other political parties interested in loyalist weapons?'
"It is a very simplistic question which goes to the core of what is wrong at the minute with this process."
Mr Ervine said he was detecting "confusion" in both groups that paramilitaries were being told everyone must build a better society and yet they were being left out of the discussions on how to achieve that.
He continued: "There is not a chance, at this moment, of re-engagement with the IICD (Independent International Commission on Decommissioning) while the notion of change within this society in relation to the political use of weapons finds the Republican Movement the focus of attention."
PA