IRA military campaign has ended say monitors

The IRA is "withering away" and its ruling Army Council is now redundant, Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward said today.

In a bid to break the province's deadlocked political process, Mr Woodward seized on a report by the Independent Monitoring Commission that concluded that the republican military campaign was "well and truly over".

Unionists and republicans will now enter talks aimed at restoring the power-sharing government, but it was unclear whether Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson would be satisfied by the announcement.

The DUP wants to see the disbandment of the Army Council in return for agreeing to the devolution of policing and security powers to the Stormont government, a key Sinn Fein demand.

Mr Woodward admitted that the Army Council, which directed the IRA's military campaign for nearly three decades, had not fully disbanded. But he said that "the issue of disbandment is neither here nor there" because the council had became "redundant" and fallen into disuse.

Today the monitors' 12-page report said: "We are aware of the questions posed about the public disbandment of PIRA's (Provisional Irish Republican Army's) leadership structures. We believe that PIRA has chosen another method of bringing what it describes as its armed struggle to a final close.

"Under PIRA's own rules the Army Council was the body that directed its military campaign. Now that that campaign is well and truly over, the Army Council by deliberate choice is no longer operational or functional."

Mr Woodward said the report confirmed that the IRA had ceased to function. "This groundbreaking report by the IMC makes clear that the Army Council is now redundant," he said.

He added: "I urge people to read the report very carefully. As the IMC made clear, 'the leadership structures have definitely ceased to function in the way they did during the time of conflict'."

The British and Irish governments had asked the IMC, made up of security experts and politicians from the UK and Ireland, to compile a special report on the status of IRA structures.

Today in its report the IMC, which monitors paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, said the IRA's redundant structures were gradually disappearing, but said it did not expect any announcements from the republican movement as that process concluded.

"We believe that for some time now it has given up what it used to do and that by design it is being allowed to wither away," said the report.

"There have not been, and we do not foresee that there will be, formal announcements about the disbandment of all or parts of the structure.

"In our view the way in which the leadership has adopted an entirely different course, disbanded terroristrelated structures and capacity and engaged in different activities, and members have moved on to other things, means the PIRA of the recent and violent past is well beyond recall."

The IMC report said that the IRA had decommissioned its weapons and had taken a purely political path, adding that it was the only paramilitary group to have gone to such lengths.

Asked if the report would go far enough to meet DUP demands for a disbandment of the IRA Army Council, Mr Woodward insisted that the IRA posed no threat.