Sir, - Like most people in Ireland, I voted for the Good Friday Agreement. Along with all the other things that the agreement promised, I thought that the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons was included. I could not see how the trust necessary for the working of the new institutions could be established without this - and anyway was there not an international commission to oversee it? I also thought that the republican movement had signed up to the agreement along with the rest of us.
I am now being told I was badly mistaken. The political leaders of the republican movement had indeed signed, but the generals were still in their bunkers and, unlike mere voters, were not party to the agreement at all. From time to time they would say something nice, not actually about the agreement, but about a "process", which is ever so subtly different. They intimated that they might be "persuaded" to give up guns "voluntarily" but certainly not now. Apparently the very worst way to "persuade" them was for anyone, particularly a unionist, to suggest that they had an obligation to do so.
I feel like someone who has been sold an insurance policy by a dodgy salesman. When I ask for the contract to be honoured, he smiles his Mitchell McLoughlin smile and explains, at tedious length, that I have not read the small print with sufficient care. He attempts to reassure me that he understands my predicament and that he is doing his very best on my behalf, but that I must be patient because there are absolutely no guarantees that I will get a thing.
I feel let down, bamboozled and betrayed. Though I hate to admit it, I begin to think that I should have listened to Conor Cruise O'Brien and read the Daily Telegraph, because it seems that they were right about Republicans and guns and that I was wrong. - Yours, etc.,
Robin Glendinning, Island Reagh, Comber, Co Down.