Warning over dissident threat

UUP man Sam Gardiner has said the recruitment freeze must be reversed in face of a new dissident republican bomb making capacity.

Playing with budgets is playing with lives warned the MLA.

Mr Gardiner, a former chairman of the Craigavon Policing Partnership, said:

"Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, has told the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee that the way the security situation in Northern Ireland has deteriorated was not anticipated.

"He has also said that MI5 faces considerably more high priority, life-threatening investigations in Northern Ireland than they do in the rest of Great Britain.

“We need to get real here. A 150lb device has already been used in a blast at the entrance of MI5 headquarters at Palace Barracks in Holywood and a 250lb bomb has gone off outside a police station in Londonderry.

“We must be very careful that budget cuts do not undermine our capacity to meet this threat.

It will be a test of the competence of the new devolved policing arrangements that the republican dissident threat is contained.

This will clearly and logically be impossible if the manpower of the PSNI is undermined because of spending cuts, real or imagined.

Playing budgets is one thing. Playing with lives is quite another.”