Trimble attacks 'unworkable' DUP assembly plan

The Ulster Unionist leader has attacked the Democratic Unionist Party's plan for a corporate-style assembly model as "unworkable" and has called on the DUP to pull out of the Review.

Speaking in the party's re-formed branch in Kilkeel on Wednesday evening, Mr Trimble challenged the DUP to reveal the full details of the proposed plan: "It took the DUP nearly six years to come forward with their alternative to the Agreement, the so-called 'corporate assembly'. It is time they put some flesh on its bones".

He said: "Dr Paisley was saying yesterday [Tuesday] that the decommissioning issue has to be settled 'once and for all'. Can we take it that the DUP has now ditched their dangerous and unworkable corporate assembly model? Or have they decided to ditch decommissioning once and for all?

"If the DUP are now in agreement with us that it is not the structures but Sinn Fein's commitment to an end to violence and to progressive decommissioning which is the issue, I am sure many unionists will welcome their conversion to our policy. They should follow through and withdraw from this charade of a Review."

He said: "Glossy publications and slide presentations cannot disguise the fact that they have so far committed just four sentences to paper to describe their proposal."

Mr Trimble questioned if this reticence was due to the fact that the DUP feared that unionists would learn that the model they were proposing ditched the requirement for IRA decommissioning.

Pointing out that the Welsh Assembly had quickly moved from a corporate to a more traditional parliamentary structure, the former First Minister said he was concerned that if the corporate structure proved to be unworkable there could be a slide into a committee or cabinet style of government.

Either of which he said would "leave the issue of decommissioning unresolved".

(SP)