Speaking after the UK Government announced an agreement with the Irish Government to appoint an independent expert to assess the need to engage with paramilitary groups in order to encourage them to disband.

"Paramilitarism is a poison in our society. It continues to offer nothing to communities other than creating more victims and misery and exerting coercive control over some of the most vulnerable in our community,” said Lagan Valley MP Ms Eastwood.

“There is no doubt both paramilitaries and any of their legacy structures need dismantled and their crimes must be tackled robustly if communities are to thrive and flourish.

"We are now 27 years after the Good Friday Agreement – it is well beyond time those engaged in paramilitarism left the stage. They have had every opportunity to do so, and yet instead many continue to recruit and groom young people and criminally exploit them, to deal drugs and death in our communities, to extort and racketeer from legitimate local businesses and to prey on poverty and deprivation with loan sharking. 

“Despite asking on many occasions, I have yet to hear articulated a single compelling barrier to disbandment of these organisations, other than their commitment to continue. Many have already transitioned into organised crime gangs.

"The Executive has carried out good work on this issue through its programme on paramilitary and organised crime, to try and ensure future generations are not exploited or traumatised in the same way and shining a light on the often-hidden harms it brings. It has also effectively challenged any sense of legitimacy these gangs seek to invoke within communities. That evidenced-based work has been effective in undermining their status within communities.

"The Government appointing an interlocutor to engage with these organisations flies in the face of that work and gives them a credibility and legitimacy which is not extended, and rightly so, to any other criminal gangs. Paramilitaries do not need to be negotiated with, encouraged or offered inducements to get off the backs of the community. The UK Government needs to realise this and instead of appointing a go between, tell these illegal groups they should disband immediately and remind them failure to do so will result in them continuing to face the full force of the law."