Put up or shut up, McGuinness tells rivals

Northern Ireland’s political leaders will accommodate up to 2,000 Syrian refugees in the region not because they are required to, but because they want to, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness has said.

Peter Robinson took part in the talks involving the Executive parties and British and Irish governments – just hours after he had been discharged from hospital.

“And after unionists said that party should be excluded from leadership positions in the government, things quickly deteriorated from there”.

They will look at information held by the police, the National Crime Agency (NCA) and security services.

“Of course criminality is a real issue in our communities and it must be confronted wherever and whenever it occurs”, he said.

The fallout from the shooting and the other problems besetting power-sharing – including the stalemate over welfare reform – are all on the agenda during the talks.

“There is also the big challenge of seeing whether we can actually get over the hurdle of implementing the Stormont House Agreement”.

Following the announcement by Northern Secretary of State Theresa Villiers that the British government has commissioned an independent assessment of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the DUP has agreed to participate in multiparty talks at Stormont next week.

It will investigate the structure, role and goal of the bodies, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) said, following the murder of a man by Provisional IRA members which has rocked the political establishment.

Northern Ireland republicans and unionists on Monday launched a round of talks aimed at defusing the most acute political crisis there in recent memory.

He was gunned down in a suspected revenge attack following the murder of former Provo boss Gerard Davison three months earlier.

A close ally of Greece’s Syriza, which won re-election on Sunday, Sinn Fein’s dogged opposition to austerity has lifted its support in the republic to an average of around 20 percent in opinion polls this year, from 10 percent in the 2011 election.

“One of our six demands, and it will be no surprise, will be for a permanent structure to carry out that kind of review and, like the IMC (International Monitoring Commission), it should have sanctions applied to anybody who breaches it”, he said.

Speaking to UTV’s Marc Mallett, he said: “What we will do in the next few days is take some time as a party and decide about the options that are before us and certainly talk to the government about what they are going to do because they have to respond properly to what has happened”.

Ulster Unionist chairman Lord Empey said the Stormont Assembly had not yet lived up to public expectations.

“It was simply a bad reaction to some of the medication”.

“Lastly, I am planning to discuss with the Northern Ireland justice minister and the Irish justice minister how we can work best together in our efforts to tackle cross-border crime”.