Representatives of Northern Ireland's major outlawed Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association, pledged to stay on the road to lasting peace Friday following their first-ever meeting with the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.Five men from the group's legal political wing, the Ulster Political Research Group, spent two hours at the private home of Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, in the ecclesiastical capital of Armagh.
"There will be no going back. We are here to build a new future," the group's leader, Frankie Gallagher, told a news conference after his delegation _ among them former UDA gunmen _ shook hands with the cardinal, two Catholic bishops and a priest.
In recent weeks the UDA frontmen have been reaching out to Catholic politicians to reassure them that the organization no longer poses a threat, despite its continued refusal to disarm in support of Northern Ireland's peace process.
Catholic leaders, in turn, have lauded the UDA _ which killed more than 300 Catholic civilians in vengeance for Irish Republican Army violence _ for remaining unusually calm in response to last month's surge in attacks by IRA dissidents. UDA members often have violated their 1994 cease-fire in the past.
Two IRA splinter groups last month claimed responsibility for shooting dead two off-duty British soldiers and a policeman in what were the first lethal strikes against security forces since 1998, the year of Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace accord. The dissidents also mounted widespread car hijackings and bomb threats.
Gallagher said Catholics were understandably worried that UDA members would respond violently to the IRA dissidents. "We hope that today's meeting has gone some way in alleviating those fears," he said.
Brady declined to answer questions. In a statement the Catholic cardinal called it "a highly significant meeting, important in its symbolism as well as its substance."
"We appreciate and are greatly encouraged by the assurance given by the UPRG today that there is no going back to the past, that together we are building a new future," Brady said.
The UDA was created in 1971 as an umbrella for Protestant vigilante groups hostile to the IRA, which the previous year had begun killing police officers and planting bombs in hopes of forcing the predominantly Protestant territory out of the United Kingdom.
The IRA renounced violence and disarmed in 2005, 11 years after calling a cease-fire that the UDA and other Protestant paramilitary groups matched. The IRA's Sinn Fein party today is the leading Catholic voice in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government. The UDA by contrast exists on the fringe of politics because its representatives attract too little support from voters.
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