THE DUP MP who claimed residents in a shared housing scheme “didn't want a public fuss” over UVF flags has insisted her party always “stood firm against terrorism”.
Emma Little-Pengelly, who ahead of June’s general election was among DUP candidates endorsed by an umbrella group backed by the main loyalist paramilitary groups, also told the party conference that “terrorism was always wrong”.
The DUP has faced criticism in the past for sharing platforms with loyalist paramilitaries, including former MP Rev William McCrea standing at a Portadown rally alongside LVF leader Billy Wright in 1996.
In June this year, Arlene Foster was criticised for meeting UDA leader Jackie McDonald just days after a breakaway faction of the paramilitary organisation was linked to a brutal murder.
The party has also faced questions about its links to Ulster Resistance in the 1980s, of which Ms Little-Pengelly’s father Noel Little was a founding member.
He was one of three men arrested in Paris in 1989 in connection with a plot to exchange a missile stolen from Shorts for South African guns.
Ms Little-Pengelly has insisted she has been "utterly consistent in my condemnation of terrorism", while fellow MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said earlier this year his party would not “accept support from anyone who is engaged in paramilitary or criminal activity”.
Ms Little-Pengelly put her defeat of SDLP MP Alasdair McDonnell down to the fact that many people in South Belfast “decided to vote again for the first time in a long time”.
“This was a victory for all those communities across south Belfast who mobilised together and achieved, after 12 years, what many said was not possible,” she said.
In what appeared to be an attack on Sinn Féin, she also told the conference that the DUP had “stood firm against terrorism – and we always will”.
“Terrorism was always wrong – it was never justified,” she said.
“While others shamefully celebrate and commemorate terrorists, this party stands firmly for democracy and behind the true heroes who fought against tyranny and for the rights of those who could not fight for themselves.”
She said the IRA was the “single biggest killer of both Catholics and Protestants” during the Troubles.
“When the political obituary of Gerry Adams is written, his legacy will not be the laughter of children, but the tears and sorrow of thousands of victims."
Earlier this year when controversy flared over the erection of loyalist flags at a shared housing scheme in Belfast, Ms Little-Pengelly said she had spoken to residents and they had told her they “didn’t want to make a public fuss”.
She later said she “opposes all paramilitaries in our society, that includes paramilitary flags”.
Several Catholic families fled Cantrell Close off the Ravenhill Road in September after threats believed to have been issued by the UVF.
