Paisley leads DUP walkout of NI Assembly

DUP Leader Ian Paisley has taken his Democratic Unionist party out of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Dr Paisley led the walkout after he accused the British government of "double standards".

In a prepared statement Dr Paisley said: “The resignation of the unionist Ministers from office last Thursday has left the Northern Ireland Government run entirely by nationalist and republican Ministers. If the situation had been reversed and only unionists had been in office the reality is that the Secretary of State would not have permitted this situation to continue for a single day.”

Dr Paisley said that the Secretary of State had compounded this “blatant hypocrisy” by his remarks that “any movement on decommissioning would be reacted to by the government”.

Claiming that there was one rule for republicans and another rule for unionists, Dr Paisley branded the current situation where only republicans and nationalists held power as “utterly unacceptable”. He also hit out at the Official Unionists stance which he said had “weakened the position of Unionists in Ulster”. He said that Ulster Unionist Leader David Trimble was “engaged in taking part in another fudge” that would “help Sinn Fein back into his Government.”

Dr Paisley added that neither was he prepared to place the future of his children and his children’s children in the hands of the de Chastelain Commission.

On Thursday the main unionist parties declared that they would no longer take part in the Assembly’s Executive tier and pulled out all the Ulster Unionist and Democratic Unionist ministers out of the Executive.

The DUP move comes amid ongoing speculation that there was an imminent and possibly significant move to be made by republicans on decommissioning.

Earlier on Monday, Northern Ireland Secretary of State John Reid told paramilitaries in the province that the government’s response to the actual decommissioning of weapons would not be “grudging or ungenerous”. (SP)