As the early release of paramilitary prisoners under the Belfast Agreement continued yesterday unionists and nationalists were still locked in disagreement over decommissioning.
The total released under the scheme has now risen to 34. Yesterday one UDA, one UVF and eight IRA prisoners were freed from the Maze Prison. Prison sources said none of those released was a life-sentence prisoner. "None of them is serving time for murder, and none could be placed in the category of `notorious' IRA or loyalist prisoners," one source said.
Meanwhile, senior members of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the SDLP clashed over the interpretation of the Belfast Agreement. Mr Reg Empey of the UUP insisted that the agreement did not provide for any automatic place for Sinn Fein on a shadow Assembly executive while Ms Brid Rodgers of the SDLP said Sinn Fein should be on the executive.
Mr Empey said that implicit in the demands for parties to the agreement to sign up to a commitment to "exclusively peaceful and democratic" politics was a requirement for some prior decommissioning from the IRA before Sinn Fein could sit in government.
"As any group which seeks places in government must honour these commitments it is clear that those associated with an active paramilitary organisation are ineligible for office," he said. But Ms Rodgers, chairwoman of the SDLP's Assembly grouping, countered that no new preconditions could be put on any party's ability to participate in the executive. "Nowhere, and I repeat nowhere, in the agreement does it say that there must be decommissioning before parties take their seats on the executive. Nine parties signed up to the agreement on Good Friday and 72 per cent of the people of the North endorsed it in referendum. The UUP cannot now try and renegotiate its terms," she added.
Ms Rodgers suggested that some movement towards disarmament from the IRA would assist the peace process.
The Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) accused unionists of engineering a dispute over decommissioning in order to "destabilise the current political climate". "Attempts by unionists to rewrite the agreement at this stage run contrary to the wishes of the vast majority of the people of Ireland as freely expressed in the referendums. Meanwhile, the Assembly refuses to deal with the most pressing problem, that of ongoing sectarian attacks on the nationalist working-class community," it said in a statement.
A DUP Assembly member, Mr Oliver Gibson, said the republican and nationalist attitude to IRA decommissioning reflected the reality of the agreement. Now was the time for unionist unity "to take us out of the morass of an agreement that neither Trimble, Mallon or Adams can deliver".
