A senior loyalist politician in Northern Ireland challenged the Government today to have him arrested if it believed his party had a say over what the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando do.
Progressive Unionist leader David Ervine issued the challenge after Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain gave the party a week to argue for the resumption of its Assembly allowances after he said he was thinking of withholding them for another year.
Progressive Unionist Party leader David Ervine
In a written statement to MPs, Mr Hain said he was considering the move after a report in May by a body which monitors the loyalist and republican ceasefires said the PUP had failed to exert any influence over the UVF and Red Hand Commando.
"The (Independent Monitoring) Commission recommended that I should continue the financial measures against the Progressive Unionist Party," he said. "I have considered carefully the IMC's report and I have today written to the Progressive Unionist Party to advise them that I am minded to remove for a period of 12 months the party's entitlement to financial assistance payable to political parties in Northern Ireland.
"I have provided the PUP with seven days from today to make representations to me. At the end of that period I will take into account any such representations made to me and will reach a final decision."
The four member IMC said in its report for the British and Irish Governments that the UVF and Red hand Commando remained heavily involved in crime, active as a paramilitary group and violent. A bitter feud over the past fortnight between the UVF and the Loyalist Volunteer Force in Belfast has put the PUP`s links again under the spotlight, with nationalist SDLP Assembly member Alban Maginness urging the party yesterday to sever all its ties with paramilitaries.
The feud claimed the life of 20-year-old Craig McCausland in north Belfast last week, whose family has denied he had any link to the LVF or any other terror group, and whose mother, Lorraine, was believed to have been murdered by loyalists in 1987 in a vicious beating near a drinking club.
Earlier this month, 25-year-old Jameson Lockhart was also gunned down as he worked on a building site in east Belfast in an attack also blamed on the UVF.
The UVF was also blamed for a gun attack on a house in the east of the city on Monday night.
Mr Ervine, the PUP`s sole Assembly member, said today he was willing to meet Mr Hain over the course of the next week. But he also challenged the Government to have him arrested if it believed the PUP had a say over what the UVF and Red Hand Commando did.
"I am willing to meet the Secretary of State and lay before him the reality of life within the leadership of the PUP who in some people`s eyes seem to be responsible for all of the things that are wrong in this society," the East Belfast MLA said.
"The reality is our record speaks for itself - our desires and wishes for Northern Ireland have been well laid out. "It is against all the tenets of natural justice that people who are not responsible for what paramilitaries do are punished in this way.
"I am the leader of the PUP. If I have broken any laws or rules, I would like to be arrested and charged now."