THE Real IRA was blamed yesterday for attacking the vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

Denis Bradley, a former priest, was beaten by a masked man wielding a baseball bat while he was watching a football match with his son in a pub in Londonderry.

Mr Bradley, who was the key contact between the Government and Martin McGuinness in the Eighties and Nineties while the Provisional IRA considered a ceasefire, spent Tuesday night in the Altnagelvin Hospital and was treated for cuts to his head and nose.

The community worker has received previous threats from republican terrorists. He has also suffered attacks on his home in Londonderry since taking up his position on the Policing Board. Last year his family escaped a petrol bomb attack.

The Real IRA, responsible for the 1998 Omagh bomb that killed 28 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, has some support in the city.

It split from the Provisional IRA over the Good Friday Agreement. The Provisionals and their political wing, Sinn Fein, have yet to endorse the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

The attack was condemned by politicians across the political spectrum and on both sides of the Irish border.

Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, who visited Mr Bradley in hospital, said: “The attack on Denis Bradley was wrong and unacceptable and must be condemned.

“The fact that he is the vice-chairperson of the policing board does not warrant an attack on either him or his family.” Meanwhile Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, promised an “intensive engagement” with Protestant leaders in an attempt to tackle the needs of loyalist areas.

Mr Hain was making his first formal response to the growing crisis in Unionism after riots earlier this month during which the police came under sustained live fire from paramilitaries. The Northern Ireland Secretary, accepted that there was frustration and anger among Unionists but told loyalists: “You will not be allowed to terrorise your own communities.”

He said that there was a “loud and clear perception that public money is being channelled into community projects under the influence of paramilitaries who speak the words of community work while undermining those very areas with racketeering and organised violence”.

Mr Hain also cautioned that the imbalance in the economy, with public spending almost a third higher per head than the UK average, was unsustainable.

The province “by any standards” was over-administered, he said, with 26 councils, 4 health boards, 19 health trusts, 5 education and library boards and about 100 other public bodies.

A shake-up of public administration had a deadline of 2009 and would “challenge the status quo — they will disrupt power bases and vested interests”, he said.

• Sir Reg Empey, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, called on John Reid, the Defence Secretary, to agree a £200 million redundancy package for Royal Irish Regiment soldiers when three home service battalions are disbanded in less than two years. More than 3,000 jobs are likely to be lost as a result of the security scaledown. Sir Reg argued that some soldiers should be kept.

  He said: “Retaining a locally-recruited capability would be a much more cost-effective aid to civil power, if required, than relying on regular Army providing the back-up when they are stretched across the world and would need training.”

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