IT'S NOT every day a leading loyalist quotes a sacred republican text to you. Sitting in the cramped offices of the Progressive Unionist Party on Belfast's Shankill Road, Mr David Ervine intoned the words of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, who died on hunger strike at Brixton Prison in 1920.
"It is not those who can inflict most, but those that can suffer most who will conquer". The Times had asked him for a comment on the letter last week in An Phoblach/Republican News in which an IRA prisoner in Britain, Joe O'Connell, described the ending of the ceasefire as "stupid, blinkered and ill conceived".
Mr Ervine, whose party is close to the thinking of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), used the MacSwiney quotation to buttress his that the renewed IRA campaign was "even immoral in republican terms".
One does not expect the word "please" to feature in loyalist appeals to the IRA but Mr Ervine used it twice. "Please reinstate that ceasefire," he said. "Please."
Mr Ervine claims his loyalist colleagues are being "targeted" by the IRA. "We have also evidence of known IRA activists following the wives of leading loyalists to school when they're dropping off their kids. It is perhaps only to be seen doing so but nevertheless it causes a great deal of consternation."
PUP press officer Mr Billy Hutchinson agreed. "People are being targeted. Known republicans have been seen in loyalist areas and have been identified," he said.
Sources in the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), political associates of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), claimed IRA activists had been staking out places frequented by loyalists, even during the 17 months of the ceasefire.
The UDP sources were reluctant to make too much of these practices in case elements among the loyalist paramilitaries decided, as the saying goes to "get their retaliation in first".
They said senior loyalists were cautious about their movements and the areas they frequented and they still checked under their cars for the notorious "Semtex surprise". But danger is a fact of life on the fringes of Northern Ireland politics: "There has to be a fine judgment between caution and paranoia."
The Rev Roy Magee, a key broker of the loyalist ceasefire, was invited to a meeting last weekend by a group of loyalist dissidents who expressed "very grave concern" at families were receiving from the IRA.
The IRA statement on Tuesday night indicated this targeting would cease, but this was not sufficient to prevent a loyalist backlash. The loyalist paramilitaries see themselves as British and any attack on anything that's British is an attack on their ethos and identity and I think, if it continued, they would respond to attacks, even on the mainland", Mr Magee declared.
He said last weekend's meeting indicated a "fragmentation" in the loyalist movement. "It's a very serious development and quite a serious threat and should not be treated lightly at all."
The IRA should reinstate the ceasefire "as soon as ever possible." Despite having different aims, the two sets of paramilities have a "tremendous amount in common", according to Mr Magee.
"Violence cannot pay, it is counter productive, and we have got to get to a place where we make room for each other and can live in harmony and in peace together." The loyalists wanted "to live in peace with their nationalist neighbours" and their leaders in particular were "very sound men who think things through" he said.
"My hope is pinned very much, on the leadership - because they have acted with restraint and in a very reasonable way - that they will be able to convince those who are straining at the leash to get back to military activity that the way forward is not the way of violence, but the way of democracy," Mr Magee said.
Mr Ervine said he had a "mixed" reaction to Tuesday's statement. If it meant there were going to be no attacks on loyalists that was "no bad thing" but the IRA was being arrogant and patronising because it was really telling the loyalists: "We'll plant bombs at Canary Wharf and we'll destroy peace, but you stay on your ceasefire."
He said the ceasefire called by the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) was "solid". Although it was outside his own remit, he was confident the dissidents could be restrained "in calm and rational manner" by the CLMC.
Mr Ervine hoped the IRA would now issue another statement restoring the ceasefire. "The war is futile," he said. "Someday, somehow somewhere, the circumstances of Northern Ireland will be dealt with politically. If we recognise that is the case, then we must recognise the immorality of violence."