The IRA leadership has eschewed paramilitary and also criminal activity and is working to prevent former or serving members carrying out individual acts of crime, according to the British and Irish governments.
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell and Northern Secretary Peter Hain at Hillsborough Castle yesterday made the most confident joint British-Irish assertion to date that the IRA has ended activity including criminality, notwithstanding DUP claims that such statements are "fantasy".
Friday is the first anniversary of the IRA's statement ending its armed struggle and yesterday, after a British Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC) meeting, Mr McDowell said it was his and the assessment of the Northern security minister Paul Goggins that the "Provisional IRA is adhering 100 per cent to the commitments that it has made".
Mr Hain told reporters that the current British and Irish intelligence was that the IRA leadership was not involved in criminality.
"There may still be - there probably is still - some localised individualised criminality by former and maybe existing PIRA members for their own private gain. What there is not is any organised-from-the-centre criminality any more," he said.
"To that extent, the IRA are delivering, as Michael [ McDowell] said, on their commitments made last July, not just in respect of shutting down paramilitary activity but shutting down criminality and [ they] have closed down a number of operations," added the Northern Secretary.
Mr Hain said it was not realistic or reasonable to expect an "absolute state of perfection" in relation to the issue before the government's November 24th deadline for the restoration of devolution. "I don't think anybody really would expect that or should reasonably do so." He said that any discovery of "an individual member of the IRA engaged in criminality for private gain" should not be "an obstacle to restoration" of devolution when the IRA "leadership and the whole organisation is stopping it happening and, indeed, their leaders are denouncing it when they discover that it does happen".
DUP MP Nigel Dodds said Mr Hain was "living in fantasy land if he seriously believes that the IRA is no longer engaged in terror and criminal behaviour".
"This ploy, designed to set the scene to excuse IRA criminality before the autumn deadline, will not work," he said.
