Alderdice not in favour of recreating IRA monitoring body

A former member of the commission which monitored the IRA ceasefire has said recreating the organisation to investigate paramilitary activity would not be appropriate.

Lord Alderdice led the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) until 2011. He said it could take months to set up and added it could not address other political divisions which have driven the power-sharing government in Northern Ireland towards suspension.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and unionist politicians have said they would support establishing a new organisation similar to the IMC.

Lord Alderdice told the BBC’s Talkback programme: “For people to look back at a form of treatment that worked before and say the symptoms are the same so the diagnosis is the same . . . the IMC was appropriate for the time and it worked but I don’t think it would be an appropriate thing to bring it back. You would be talking about something that would take months to function in an effective way.”

He said there needed to be a process to deal with political problems in Belfast within the next few weeks.

The IMC was established in 2003 by the British and Irish governments and Lord Alderdice said it took some time for it to earn credibility as an independent voice. It spoke to intelligence agencies from abroad and a range of other sources in making its assessments and established its independence from the governments, once contradicting another organisation designed to oversee IRA arms decommissioning.

The other three commissioners were Joe Brosnan (former head of the Department of Justice in Ireland), John Grieve (former head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch) and Dick Kerr (former deputy director of the CIA). Over some seven and a half years the IMC produced 26 monitoring reports on paramilitary and security activity, submitting their final report to the two governments on March 14th, 2011.

Lord Alderdice said there was never a statement from the IRA that it had disbanded but added people had to differentiate between the IRA of the past and today. “I think it is obvious that there are people there who have a criminal past. They are not personally engaged in running a paramilitary campaign.”