IAN Paisley Jr has warned terrorism still remains a dark cloud over Northern Ireland.

Speaking exclusively to GB News ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the son of Rev Ian Paisley, who famously opposed the deal, said: “Terrorism hasn’t gone away. We have had serious threats on the lives of police officers over the last 25 years. We’ve had a number of them murdered. In recent weeks we saw an attempt to murder a senior police officer here so the terrorism threat has never gone away. People like me and other public representatives still live under a constant threat of terrorist violence in Northern Ireland, despite the fact that people say you’ve got peace and stability.

“We certainly have a better situation than we had 25 or 26 years ago, but we still do have this cloud of violence and gangs affiliated with Republicanism. I think that the decision to raise the terrorist threat is a clear indication that a lot more work has got to be done. Because 25 years after the so-called Peace Agreement, we’re still dealing with the legacy.”

Commenting on the Good Friday agreement itself, he told Philip Davies and Esther McVey: “People often refer to this as a peace agreement and the delivery of peace suggesting that if there hadn’t been the Belfast agreement that wouldn’t have been peace. We have to be absolutely clear that the people of North America were entitled to peace. The idea that they had to sit down and make an agreement in order to have peace I think jarred with people in Northern Ireland because having peace was a right. The war was illegal. The activities of the IRA were wrong, the things that they were doing should not have ever been done on any people. It shouldn’t have happened.”

On what he’d like to see happen now he added: “We need to harvest political stability, and the institutions that have flowed from the Belfast agreement have not been stable for about 40% of the time of the last 25 years. They haven’t functioned properly. And we’ve got to try and get to a point where they do function properly. And that only will happen if we’ve got good stable political leadership and leadership that recognises that you’ve got essentially two tribes in Northern Ireland, and they’ve got to work together.”