Taoiseach curtails his campaigning for meeting with Trimble

The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, interrupted his election campaigning yesterday to meet the Northern Ireland First Minister, Mr David Trimble, and the North's Minister for Trade, Enterprise and Investment, Sir Reg Empey, amid concerns over what Mr Trimble called the "continuing paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland".

Mr Ahern, who travelled back from his political canvass in Co Mayo for the meeting at Government Buildings, said he appreciated the "very genuine concerns" expressed by Mr Trimble and Sir Reg, but he believed that the IRA ceasefire was still in place.

Asked about a reported remark by Mr Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Féin, to the effect that the IRA had not killed a member of the police force or army in Northern Ireland in five years, Mr Ahern replied that he had not actually heard the remark. However, if reports of it were accurate, then his response would be: "If you are not firing at anyone, then why do you need soldiers at all?"

He added: "I think we need to get away from that, but I understand that that is what Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness want to do."

Mr Ahern said what all parties to the peace process in Northern Ireland wanted to achieve was for it "to be allowed to move on, that after eight years of the peace process it was time to get to the end of the process and have a normalisation of affairs".

He said this was hard to achieve when "we have structures, organised, sophisticated structures, outside the democratic process".

Addressing the waiting press, Mr Trimble said that everyone was aware of what was happening in Colombia, where three Sinn Féin members had been arrested under suspicious circumstances, and this had created a crisis of confidence within the community in Northern Ireland.

He claimed that the hearings in Colombia had confirmed that the IRA had been "part of an international network supplying expertise to FARC terrorists - mainly, it seems, in order to raise funding".

He also referred to the "Donaghmore killing, which no serious commentator attributes to anybody but the republicans, the discovery of active targeting, and then, of course, concern over Castlereagh".

Mr Trimble said that these issues had done an awful lot to undermine confidence. Consequently, he had thought it best to come to Dublin to "share their concerns" with the Taoiseach.

However, he added: "It is not our desire to see the institutions, the hard-fought institutions in the agreement, put at risk, but the fact remains that unless there is a clear, demonstrative move towards the use of exclusively peaceful, democratic means, then there are very serious difficulties."

Referring to the reported comments of Mr McGuinness that the IRA had not "even fired a shot" at a Northern police officer or attacked any member of the British army in the past five years, Mr Trimble said: "Of course, you will know that in the last five years they have killed a policeman down here . . . What we've got is this notion that there is some sort of licence for some continuing form of paramilitary activity. What there ought to be is the progress towards exclusively peaceful and democratic means."