Lord Trimble says Independent Monitoring Commission, which acts as political deterrent against return to violence, might help restore unionist confidence

Northern Ireland’s former first minister, Lord Trimble has suggested reviving a group of international security experts who can monitor ongoing IRA and other paramilitaries’ activities as a means of rescuing power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

The Nobel peace prize winner and Tory peer said on Sunday that the revival of the Independent Monitoring Commission might help to restore unionist confidence in the political process.

The IMC was created in the late 1990s to not only monitor IRA and loyalist organisations but also act as a political deterrent against any return to violence. It was wound up in 2005 after the Provisional IRA leadership announced it was disbanding as a military movement and later disarmed most of its huge illegal arsenal. The monitoring group was comprised of former security officials from the British police, the CIA and the Garda Síochána.

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The power-sharing government hangs by a thread following the murder of former IRA assassin Kevin McGuigan in August. Police Service of Northern Ireland chief constable, George Hamilton, later blamed members of the PIRA for killing McGuigan although he also stressed the organisation’s leadership did not sanction the murder.

On Saturday the Ulster Unionist party formally announced its withdrawal from the five-party coalition in Stormont, piling enormous pressure on the rival Democratic Unionist party to follow them out of the regional government.

The DUP has said it would prefer to win backing for Sinn Féin’s expulsion from the power-sharing executive from other parties over the alleged ongoing existence of the PIRA. However, such a move is unlikely to win the backing of the nationalist SDLP or Alliance party, and in turn would create internal demands from within the DUP to also leave the devolved administration.

But Trimble, also a former leader of the UUP, said that resurrecting the IMC could act as a “confidence-building measure” for the unionist community. “I think the IMC should be brought back because it did act as a deterrent in the past,” he said.

The Nobel laureate added: “In addition to re-establishing the IMC, there is a need for some sanctions against any party linked to paramilitaries where that specific paramilitary group re-engages in violence. None of this needed to happen if republicans could be honest and not play silly buggers with the peace process, and give up its addiction to violence.”

Sinn Féin has accused political opponents north and south of the Irish border who blame the IRA for the McGuigan murder of “electioneering” before elections in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland next year.

But Ireland’s foreign minister, Charlie Flanagan, said on Sunday that people did not believe Sinn Féin’s denials that the PIRA continued to exist in some form. “I believe that normal politics will only be introduced on this island fully if Sinn Féin uses its influence to ensure that the IRA is put firmly out of business,” Flanagan said.

Flanagan criticised the UUP for pulling out of government, describing the move as “car-crash politics”.

Flanagan will hold talks with his counterpart, the Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, later this week as the crisis deepens. After the bank holiday the UUP’s sole minister in the power sharing executive, Danny Kennedy, will resign his transport portfolio and the party will go into opposition.