UK, Ireland may hold direct talks with remaining N.Ireland paramilitaries

BELFAST (Reuters) - The British and Irish governments will explore whether to have talks with paramilitary groups that are still active and involved in crime in Northern Ireland to encourage them to disband, Britain's minister for the region said on Tuesday.

While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement largely ended 30 years of sectarian violence and led to the disarming of large Irish Republican and pro-British loyalist militant groups, splinter factions still engage in paramilitary and criminal activities.

The Independent Reporting Commission (IRC), which monitors paramilitary groups, said on Tuesday that such groups continue to exert control over some communities, including through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing.

It repeated a recommendation that the two governments, which are the guarantors of the peace deal, should directly engage with paramilitary groups. The governments agreed to appoint an independent expert to carry out a short scoping exercise to assess whether there is merit in such a formal process.

"I want to be clear that this is not the start of a formal process itself," Britain's Northern Ireland minister Hilary Benn said in a statement.

"I also want to be clear that no financial offer will be made to paramilitary groups or to the individuals involved in them in exchange for an end to violence and ongoing harms."

Britain's MI5 intelligence agency last year lowered the threat level in Northern Ireland from domestic terrorism to "substantial", meaning an attack is likely, from "severe", which meant an attack was highly likely.

In its seventh annual report on Tuesday, the IRC said that while there was a drop in shootings, bombings and paramilitary-style assaults last year, with political and policing actions having a real impact, paramilitary groups continue to persist and "remain a real concern".

(Reporting by Amanda Ferguson and Padraic Halpin; editing by Mark Heinrich)