The Rev Ian Paisley, leader of the campaign against the Good Friday Agreement, has fervently denied that his Democratic Unionist Party will wreck the Northern Ireland Assembly from within.

"We're not wreckers, we're saviours of the Union," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. He insisted that any suggestions that the party was out to destroy the process were "entirely wrong".

The DUP leader said there was a serious bias against him and his views.

It was "very strange", he said, that when the Prime Minister insisted on the decommissioning of weapons, that no men of violence would be allowed to sit in the assembly, and that the RUC would be protected, Mr Blair was "basking as if he had done something great".

But Mr Paisley said that when he stated the same things he was "called a wrecker".

"We will not be entering the assembly to save the Union, we will be entering the assembly to nail Tony Blair's hide to the fence. He has made promises he is going to do things which are not in the agreement and we are going to hold him to those."

When asked if, as a party with the word 'democratic' in the title, he was going to ignore the will of the people, Mr Paisley defended his right to dissent.

He said that that violence continued in the province, and that 280,000 people had rejected the peace deal in the Referendum - and they also had rights.

No Compromise on Union

Mr Paisley defended the rights of unionists and those who voted against the Stormont Agreement, saying:

"There cannot be any compromise whatsoever on the Union. We have in this act the destruction of the 1920 Act and we have in this act the destruction of the Act of Union, we have in this act the release on to the streets all the worst gunmen and the worst killers in history and then you say to me I should be happy about it.

"I am not and neither are the people of Northern Ireland. The people of Northern Ireland have some rights and now you are getting us into the position where these people, 280,000 of them, should not have rights at all."
 

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