THE Progressive Unionist Party leader, Mr David Ervine, has urged loyalist paramilitaries to ignore the IRA and follow their own agenda.
In an emotive address to his party's annual conference in Belfast on Saturday, Mr Ervine said that loyalism at last had a coherent political philosophy and was winning considerable international respect.
These gains should not be jeopardised by a return to violence. He urged the Combined Loyalist Military Command to act in a restrained manner.
Mr Ervine was speaking just after the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, warned that the North was on the "edge of an abyss" and that Sinn Fein must be immediately included in all party talks in order to navigate past this "very critical point".
"You have a political philosophy, you have a dream" Mr Ervine urged the loyalist paramilitaries. "Follow that dream. Do not go on anybody else's agenda, not the agenda of `no, no, no', not the agenda of bombs and pain and hurt.
"Follow the agenda of an honourable, decent people who can for the first time be seen as the people they are, a people who want peace and who are prepared to take risks and be pro active for peace".
The PUP leader said that his party had offered its advice to loyalist paramilitary leaders on the way forward. "We are now outside the door," he stated.
"The CLMC, in their own time, having heard the Progressive Unionist and Ulster Democratic parties' analyses, and having discussed this with their prisoners, will make that decision."
It was unfair of the media to demand an immediate response from the CLMC, he said, as the IRA had taken eight months to deliver its opinion on the Downing Street Declaration.
He stressed that loyalists had acted in a restrained fashion despite IRA provocation in the past. The CLMC had called a ceasefire in 1991 to facilitate dialogue during the Brooke talks. It had not broken it, he said, despite a no warning IRA car bomb in a loyalist housing estate.
He urged loyalists to forget about the IRA, as it was "well outside any political philosophy which could conceivably be taken, to a talks process at this time". Republicans lived "in a dream, in a 1918 dream which has little to do with life in Northern Ireland in 1996", he said.
Mr Ervine also accused the IRA of backtracking, not just on the use of violence but on the principle of consent. The Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 had copper fastened the consent principle, so the Provisionals had known "what they were getting into" when they announced the ceasefire eight months later.
They had gone back on everything, Mr Ervine said. "It is shameful, despicable and evil". Republicans, as usual, bad shirked their responsibility for the situation by blaming London. "If the Liffey was to flow in the opposite direction, the IRA would blame the Brits," he added.
The PUP leader said he was glad that the British government had not attempted to coerce unionists into doing what the IRA wanted. "Well, the bombs didn't do it, and the bullets didn't do it, and let me tell you a pathetic British government won't do it," he said.
"Unionism has its own opinion, its own philosophy, identity, culture and, ethos. It has the right to survive.