New DUP MLA is daughter of Ulster Resistance gun-runner

THE DUP's newest MLA is the daughter of a top loyalist who set up the paramilitary Ulster Resistance organisation with DUP leaders and later convicted of an arms plot with apartheid South Africa after his Ulster Resistance organisation smuggled in guns with the UDA/UFF and the UVF.

“Just because someone may have a past should not mean you cannot have a future,” new DUP MLA Emma Pengelly has said, declaring “my love for [my father] is unconditional”.

Emma Pengelly's father is Noel Little. He was a soldier in the British Army's Ulster Defence Regiment who was behind a plan to import hundreds of AK47 assault rifles into the North for Ulster Resistance, the UDA and the UVF.

Little was arrested in 1989 at a Paris hotel with two other loyalists – Free Presbyterian minister James King and British Army Reserve weapons instructor Samuel Quinn – as they negotiated handing over missile technology from the Shorts factory in Belfast to an official from the white supremacist government then in power in South Africa.

All three unionist paramilitaries were found guilty by a French court and received fines and suspended jail terms after being on remand. Their apartheid regime contact claimed diplomatic immunity.

Little, who had been questioned about a previous arms smuggling operation in 1987, was a close associate of Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson, who were instrumental in setting up the Ulster Resistance movement in Belfast' Ulster Hall in 1986 as part of the unionist opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Other prominent DUP figures involved included Sammy Wilson.

Speaking in October 2005, Sinn Féin's Alex Maskey, after meeting the post-apartheid South African Government Minister for Intelligence Services, Ronnie Kasrils, called on the DUP “to address the legacy of their involvement in forming Ulster Resistance and to acknowledge the role which that organisation played in rearming loyalist death squads to attack and kill innocent nationalists, republicans and Catholics”.

Some may find it refreshing to hear a DUP MLA pronounce that, “Just because someone may have a past should not mean you cannot have a future.”

Others may find it ironic given the DUP's incessant demands for full disclosure about past roles in the conflict and given the DUP's central involvement with the Ulster Resistance and when that organisation's weapons cache has still to be accounted for in any decommissioning process.

Emma Pengelly replaces the outgoing South Belfast MLA Jimmy Spratt, who is leaving the Assembly on health grounds.