12 March 1998 Edition

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DUP at loyalist rally

by Laura Friel

``The only good IRA man is a dead one and they should be exterminated,'' Ian Paisley jnr told a thousand strong loyalist rally in Portadown last week.

Brandishing a copy of the Irish News, DUP colleague Sammy Wilson denounced the ``republican broadsheet'' to cheers from the crowd. A few hours earlier and just ten miles away the scene had been so very different, as the grief-stricken families of Damien Trainor and Philip Allen buried the two victims of loyalist terror with quiet dignity.

In Portadown's Brownstown Park the DUP slipped inevitably towards the role of political cheerleaders for the LVF, the group linked to the double sectarian murder in the village of Poyntzpass. At the same venue eighteen months ago, the DUP's former Mid Ulster MP William McCrea demonstrated his support for LVF leader Billy Wright by sharing a platform at a rally organised as a show of strength by the sectarian killer. Now it was the turn of the DUP's senior spokesperson Ian Paisley jnr and Belfast Councillor Sammy Wilson.

This time the rally had been organised by a thinly disguised support group for the LVF, the Concerned Protestants Committee. In a telling comment during a television interview a spokesperson for the CPC said the world had lost ``two good people last year, Princess Diana and Billy Wright''.

Flaunting their loyalist credentials, members of the crowd were wearing LVF T-shirts. At the platform, the two DUP members were warmly greeted by Mark `Swinger' Fulton, a close associate of Billy Wright and a central figure during the Drumcree standoff last year. On the platform, Paisley jnr denounced local Ulster Unionist MP David Trimble and David Ervine (PUP) for ``consorting with the British government, Sinn Fein/IRA and the Irish government to sell Ulster down the river to Dublin''. Formed from a dissident UVF grouping in Portadown, the LVF are bitter rivals of the PUP.

Rapturous applause followed Sammy Wilson's call for a public inquiry into the death of Billy Wright. ``How can a man be murdered inside a British prison?'' says Wilson. ``There's something not right about what happened there. I want to go on the record in calling for this inquiry.'' For members of a party which would later claim they had ``no formal or informal links'' with the LVF, Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley jnr certainly knew their audience that Friday night. ``In the eyes of the LVF,'' said a LVF spokesperson, ``Ian Paisley has got it absolutely right.''

The DUP's participation in the Portadown rally came just days before fresh threats from the LVF. In a ten page document attacking the peace process, the LVF threatened Protestant leaders in the church, politics and industry, accusing them of ``colluding in a surrender process'' and promising retribution. Those guilty of selling out, the LVF warned, would not be forgotten. Interviewed by the Sunday Times, an LVF `contact' claimed the group possessed commercial detonators and were preparing to mount large scale bomb attacks in the 26 Counties.

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