Downing Street Says » Northern Ireland

» Monday, October 10, 2005

Northern Ireland

Asked about progress in Northern Ireland since decommissioning, the PMOS said we should look back at where we were in July. We had heard a very clear form of words from the IRA. We had now seen the decommissioning commission and the 2 independent witnesses saying that full decommissioning had taken place. We awaited the IMC report on paramilitary activity, or rather the lack of it in terms of the IRA. What we had seen was the implementation, we believed, of what the IRA had said it would do in July and we hoped the IMC report would support that. That was progress. Given the past we understood people’s scepticism but we believed that as the implications of the decommissioning report were assessed and once the IMC report came out hopefully people would begin to see that this time things had really changed.

Asked whether the Inland Revenue’s Asset Recovery Agency had refrained from going after "Slab" Murphy’s assets until after the decommissioning process had completed, the PMOS suggested that what was reported in newspapers was not always the case. The Asset Recovery Agency was an independent body and its remit had always been to take action against whomever it believed it needed to take action against. He had no doubt this was the basis of their actions in this instance where they had taken action against loyalist paramilitaries who had, unfortunately, not decommissioned.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.