A UDA representative, Frankie Gallagher, said at a Belfast press conference that the outlawed group regretted having killed more than 400 people, mostly Catholic civilians, from the 1970s to the ’90s.
“But we are determined and are willing to play our full part in ensuring that tragedy of the last 40 years will never happen again,’’ he said.
The governments of Britain and Ireland - which have spent more than a decade pressing all of Northern Ireland’s underground armies to disarm - welcomed the move as a final piece of the peacemaking jigsaw.
President Mary McAleese of Ireland called the disarmament “a very positive milestone on the journey of peace.’’
McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic, said the latest disarmament shows that Northern Ireland’s militant traditions are “being replaced by a culture of consensus, democracy, and good neighborliness.’’
Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Shaun Woodward, said the UDA move was spurred by his threat to withdraw the amnesty period for handing over weapons. After Feb. 9, anyone who fails to surrender illegally held weapons will face potential imprisonment.
Woodward said the belated disarmament demonstrated “that firmness of government policy . . . produced a startlingly strong outcome.’’
Two community witnesses, retired Protestant Archbishop Robin Eames and former Ulster Bank chairman George Quigley, confirmed that they observed the surrender and destruction of UDA weapons. No details were available on the logistics of the weapons handover.
The Ulster Defense Association has broadly observed a 1994 cease-fire, but previously refused to surrender its arms - chiefly guns and grenades - citing the continuing threat from Irish Republican Army dissidents.
De Chastelain has been seeking the disarmament of Northern Ireland’s panoply of illegal groups since 1997. The Good Friday peace pact of 1998 called for all truce-observing groups to disarm by mid-2000, but no major group met that deadline.
The Provisional IRA, the best-armed group, surrendered its largely Libyan-supplied weapons stockpile gradually from 2001 to 2005. The other major British Protestant gang, the Ulster Volunteer Force, completed its disarmament last year.
The Ulster Defense Association has an estimated 2,000 members, making it by far the largest illegal group in Northern Ireland. It also is the most ill disciplined, with rival “brigadiers’’ leading murderous internal feuds as part of power struggles over criminal rackets, including the sale of counterfeit goods and smuggled cigarettes.
