The latest Independent Monitoring Commission report provides further confirmation that paramilitary activity is declining and that the security situation in Northern Ireland has been transformed from what it was even 18 months ago.
We all welcome the announcement by former paramilitaries that they will now support the police and security forces, which is a good first step. Does he agree, however, that words from such sources come very cheap and that it is only through sustained delivery that we can have real confidence that they have changed?
Of course there needs to be delivery. It is important that people appreciate the fact, which the hon. Gentleman has welcomed, that the leadership of Sinn Fein has said that it is the responsibility of people to co-operate with the police in dealing with crimes such as burglary, rape and the harassment of old people. It has said that republicans should join the police, and it has said that evidence, where it exists, and information should be brought forward on the McCartney murder case. Those are all positive signs that delivery is taking place. The IMC report is definitive—as it has been in the six reports since the IRA issued its statement that it was giving up its armed campaign on 28 July—that the IRA poses no terrorist threat, that it is driving criminality out of the organisation and that it is delivering on what people have demanded: no terrorism, no criminality and support for the police and the rule of law. The House should welcome that.
Given that there have been thousands of unsolved murders and serious crimes in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years, many of them committed by the Provisional IRA, and given the statement by Sinn Fein a week ago at its conference, to which the Secretary of State alluded, does he expect, as many of us do in Northern Ireland, that even though the qualified words were there, information should now be given to the police about those crimes so that they can be brought before the courts?
As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Chief Constable’s historical inquiries team is investigating past cases. Of course, everybody will want those cases to be pursued, and where prosecutions can be brought they should be brought. What is irrefutable, however, is that in the current context—partly, I readily concede to the hon. Gentleman, due to the pressure that his party has applied over recent years—we now have a situation whereby all the parties in an incoming Executive on 26 March support the police and the rule of law. That is an historic transformation, and it is up to the DUP to respond positively to it.