The Northern Ireland peace process was "socially and morally corrupting the entire community" and had turned the North into "a powder keg primed for explosion", the UK Unionist Party leader, Mr Robert McCartney, said at the weekend.
Addressing some 150 delegates at his party's first annual conference in Bangor, Co Down on Saturday, Mr McCartney said the main objective of the peace process was "the resolution of the conflict between Sinn Fein/IRA and the British state, in order that the mainland, in general, and the City of London, in particular, may be safeguarded against terrorist violence". Mr McCartney defended his party's decision to boycott the talks and accused the UUP of failing to offer positive leadership or "any consistent and identifiable policy for the defence of the Union". He also stressed that the UK Unionists had not "adopted" the position of the DUP in their joint withdrawal from talks.
The UK Unionists had to avoid allowing the UUP to accept the laying down of Articles Two and Three of the Irish Constitution "in any circumstances, as a tradeoff for any diminution in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland".
Mr McCartney said the welfare of all the people of Northern Ireland had become subordinate to "British mainland interests". The requirement to appease terrorism had divided and polarised the community to a degree never previously experienced. The peace process had raised nationalist expectations to unrealistic heights, and unionist resentment had been deepened "by an increasing awareness that their culture, their education, their tradition, the future values of their children, and the symbols of their British identity are being systematically eroded to meet the requirements of violent republicanism", Mr McCartney said.
An "all-embracing cross-community condemnation of terrorism and those associated with it" was needed. To applause, he said the IRA and the loyalist terror groups were mirror images of each other, and referred to people on ghettoised Protestant estates "suffering under the domination of strutting UDA and UVF thugs". Middle-class people were failing to give a lead. Mr McCartney said that "the great and the good of Northern Ireland, both lay and clerical" were serving the government's policy of compromise with terrorism in the hope that it could deliver a permanent peace.
He strongly defended his decision to withdraw from talks, and admitted that he had received letters from people who had voted for him but who disapproved of his walk-out. He said it was made clear in election manifestos that his party would not enter substantive negotiations "with any party fronting terrorist organisations who themselves refused to decommission their weaponry" and that the party would not "negotiate the Union".
Mr McCartney said his party and the DUP had a common position on the purpose of the Joint Declaration, the Framework Documents and the current talks. The future of the Union would be fatally compromised if any peace package containing the Framework Proposals were approved in a referendum.