Conservative Party leader Mr Iain Duncan Smith today called on the British Prime Minister to take a tough stance on IRA disarmament and consider throwing Sinn Féin out of its offices at Westminster following the collapse of devolution in Northern Ireland.
Mr Duncan Smith, speaking at the Ulster Unionist Party annual conference Derry , said he was "exasperated" by British government concessions to republicans - from the release of prisoners, failure to insist on decommissioning in return, and the facilities provided to Sinn Féin MPs who refuse to take their seats in the House of Commons.
"The government must accept that the one-sided and unnecessary concessions such as Sinn Féin's special status at Westminster have undermined previous tough words," he said.
Mr Duncan Smith declared: "In the light of Sinn Féin's behaviour at Stormont, this special status must be reviewed.
It was time to end the "drip feed of one-sided concessions" such as further reforms to an already "demoralised and under-resourced" police service that Ulster Secretary Dr John Reid planned to introduce in the autumn, he said.
In the first address by a Tory leader to the Ulster Unionist conference in decades - and his first return to Derry since he served there as an officer with the Scots Guards in the mid-1970s, Mr Duncan Smith focused on republicans' wrong doing and said it was time for an unequivocal declaration the war was over.
What was now needed was a comprehensive agreement on the implementation of the Belfast Agreement involving strict linkages and a clear timetable, two things which, he said, the British and Irish governments had run away from until now.
"We will need genuine toughness in the leadership of the process. It means an end to private armies and the cancer of paramilitarism. It means decommissioning and disbandment. It means an unequivocal declaration that the war is over," said Mr Duncan Smith.
PA