THE DUP yesterday drove the faltering peace process more firmly aground yesterday by insisting there must be full decommissioning of arms before any paramilitaries are involved in talks.
The Rev Ian Paisley accused the UUP of vacillating on the decommissioning issue and warned "The [British] government can't make anything stick in Northern Ireland except the DUP goes with it."
The DUP leader, at a press conference, enunciated an even harder line on decommissioning than that set out by Mr David Trimble of the UUP on Monday. He said his party stood by the principle "that all terrorist weapons, either held by the IRA or by so called loyalist paramilitaries, must be handed over, full stop".
Dr Paisley asserted that the two governments "have no intention of calling in these murder weapons".
He said an attempt was being made to smooth the way for the insertion of IRA/Sinn Fein" into the talks process without a single weapon being handed over.
The latest government proposals, he said, had followed a series of meetings with the UUP by the Irish and British governments, and the DUPE had not been party to these meetings.
It was clear that both governments were focusing on the UUP as "unionism's Achilles heel" on the issue of decommissioning.
Dr Paisley said. "We have put clearly to the British government that they have got to stick by the obligations they entered into to get us here [to the Stormont talks]. We were promised that immediately we got here we would be dealing with decommissioning. They have done everything not to deal with decommissioning.
Dr Paisley claimed to have information that legislation planned by both governments would amount to providing a complete amnesty for paramilitaries. It would provide for the handing over of weapons to an independent body which would destroy any forensic evidence on these weapons and preclude such evidence from being used in a court to help obtain the convictions of terrorists.
This was an "atrocious move" and a blow against the Union, "because the laws for the Union should all be the same and we should be protected from the IRA and other terrorists in the same way the UK is".
Dr Paisley also claimed the loyalist prisoners had been "taken for a ride" by the British government. They had been promised their freedom if they went along with the loyalist ceasefire and the so called peace process.