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UUP may challenge ruling onIRA cease-fire status

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — The Ulster Unionist Party is expected to decide in a few days whether it will launch a High Court challenge to a ruling by the Northern Ireland secretary, Mo Mowlam, that the IRA cease-fire is intact.

UUP leaders met Monday in Belfast to discuss Mowlam’s recent decision. That meeting came against the backdrop of considerable press coverage of the “expulsion” from the North of six young Catholic men by the IRA.

UUP David Trimble said after the meeting that recent IRA activity entailed that the proposed review of the Good Friday agreement, to begin on Monday, Sept. 6, under the chairmanship of former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, would have to change its agenda.

Speaking after the meeting of the UUP’s assembly delegation at Stormont, Trimble said the review could no longer focus on how to set up the executive in tandem with decommissioning but must instead concentrate on whether Sinn FTin was seriously committed to peace.

Trimble said his party had not come to any firm or final decisions on whether to take legal action against Mowlam’s decision not to suspend the release of republican prisoners. Neither had it concluded whether it would continue contacts with Sinn FTin or seek the postponement of September’s review of the Good Friday accord. Instead, he said, the assembly party had unanimously agreed the British government had made a serious mistake last week in deeming the IRA had not broken its cease-fire. There was one important qualitative difference between recent loyalist and republican activity, Trimble said, and that was the IRA’s attempt to re-arm through the gun-running operation discovered in Florida. Concern over this superseded any detailed discussion on the executive, he said.

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Young men targeted

Mowlam said on Thursday that the IRA’s cease-fire was holding, although she would be keeping the position under close review, and would act decisively if she considered the truce had been breached. Within hours of her ruling, however, Trimble said that IRA exclusion orders against four young men from the County Tyrone town of Dungannon had diminished the chances of any breakthrough in talks aimed at reviving the stalled peace process.

The four men, Gerard Groogan, 18, Martin Groogan, 16, Paul McDonnell, 20, and Barry McDonnell, 17, were threatened by masked men claiming to act for the IRA and have now left the North and moved to secret addresses in London.

Local sources said they had been involved in stealing from neighbors’ houses and “joyriding” stolen cars in Dungannon. Two had been charged with badly beating an old man while his wife was at Mass, but the RUC had dropped the charges. Another two had mugged several old people, and had fired an air rifle through pensioners’ windows.

Sources said that one was suspected of being a police informer and for that reason had virtual RUC immunity from arrest, but the final straw came when they broke into an elderly woman’s house and, despite her pleas, hit her over the head with an iron bar.

One leading SDLP man in the area reacted to the news that they had been warned off as “a good move and about time,” while even Catholic priests in the area could not be found to speak well of the four men.

A local source said the four had been involved in this activity since they were 13 or 14 and were “hardened criminals” despite their relative youth. They had been given other warnings earlier, but these had not been heeded, said the source.

In contrast to the favorable reaction of some Dungannon residents, Fr. Joseph Quinn, who was contacted by the men acting for the IRA, said he was disturbed that the threat had met with strong approval in the community where they lived.

The IRA accused the youths of “anti-social behavior” with local people saying they were “sickened” by the disruption and suffering inflicted over a period of months. Martin and Gerard Groogan’s parents denied their sons had been involved in any serious crime. Martin Groogan Sr. is suffering from liver cancer and is due to enter hospital for an operation this week. Groogan expressed anger and concern that he might face death without all his family being by his side.

Meanwhile, two more youths in Belfast were ordered to leave on Monday by men claiming to be from the IRA — one, aged 15, from the Short Strand, and the other, aged 19, from Ardoyne. Republican sources said they were not aware of any evidence of the 15-year-old’s case, calling the claim “misinformation.”

The case of the 15-year-old was making headlines nevertheless. “IRA adds boy, 15, to death list” was the headline over the front page lead story in Monday’s edition of The Guardian newspaper. In an editorial Tuesday headed “Republican Fascist Tactics,” The Irish Times stated: “Short of yet another murder, it would be difficult to imagine a more provocative response by the IRA to last week’s adjudication on its cease-fire than the issuing of so-called ‘expulsion orders’ against a number of youths in Dungannon and Belfast.”

The expulsions prompted the UUP deputy leader to put the prospects of a political deal at “nil.” John Taylor also raised the prospect of his party cutting off dialogue with Sinn FTin in the light of recent IRA activity, indicating he was not in favor of his party taking part in the upcoming review of the Good Friday agreement. In her statement on the IRA cease-fire, in which she refused to stop the early release of republican prisoners, Mowlam said: “I can and must take account of all the factors specified arriving at such a judgment. That is what I have done, in accordance with the legislation, not in accordance with anyone else’s definition.”

“On that basis, although the situation in relation to the IRA is deeply worrying, I do not believe that there is a sufficient basis to conclude the IRA cease-fire has broken down

“Nor do I believe that it is disintegrating, or that these recent events represent a decision by the organization to return to violence. I have, therefore, decided not to use my powers under the Sentences Act at this time.”

The IRA, she said, had been involved in the recent murder of Belfast man Charles Bennett and in the foiled gun-running operation out of Florida. But she did not believe these two instances amounted to a wholesale break of the IRA’s cease-fire.

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