Sammy Wilson admits meetings with Sinn Féin

A Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP has said he attended secret meetings with Sinn Féin at a time when negotiations with the party were against DUP policy.

Sammy Wilson said he was "never ever asked whether I took part in those meetings or not so I never involved myself in any denial".

He said that while his party's position was that the negotiations should not be attended with Sinn Féin at the time, that the meetings did not constitute negotiations.

The Rev Harold Good, an ex-Methodist Church president, recently revealed in a book that the talks took place in his home.

Rev Good said that the meetings were attended by Martin McGuinness and Jeffrey Donaldson.

Speaking on the BBC's Talkback programme, Wilson said: "I think that anybody who has observed negotiations, not just in Northern Ireland over the years, but it's always clear that before you come to final part in negotiations both sides try to find out what are the limits, what are the things that people are prepared to accept, what are they prepared to do."

He said that the purpose of these meetings was "to assess whether there was any real intent on the other side to come to an agreement".

Wilson also insisted his party did not need to apologise about the meetings with Sinn Féin.

"We made it clear to Sinn Féin we were not prepared to sit in government with them while they were still engaged in paramilitary activity."

Officially, the DUP has always maintained it never sat down with Sinn Féin until Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams met at Stormont in March 2007, shortly before the parties entered power-sharing.

When asked about the revelations in the book the party said some individual members of the party did accept invites to meetings, facilitated by third parties, to see whether there was sufficient common ground to reach an agreement.

When Rev Good's book was published, the former Ulster Unionist Party leader Sir Reg Empey said it showed that at the time the DUP was "telling lies".

"We did speak to Sinn Féin, but we spoke to them publicly, in a talks process," he explained.

"And we were denounced right, left and centre, and some of the denunciations became physical in certain cases, and you've seen the treatment David Trimble and Daphne Trimble got in Upper Bann - pushed around and abused."

Wilson denied the party had been dishonest.

"We weren’t lying to the public, the party had an official position, individuals within the party, and I was one of them, took opportunities where they were to try and get intelligence which you could feed back so that people were in a position to know whether or not there was business to be done."

He said that these meetings were not negotiations, only information gathering exercises.