SDLP East Derry MLA has expressed his surprise at being told by police that the Regional Development Department has a policy of not prosecuting those who deface public property such as streetlights, kerbstones and roadways.

He was given this information when demanded of the police that those who painted the village of Garvagh from one end to the other be prosecuted for these acts.

Now Mr Dallat is to write to the Department both in Belfast and Coleraine to establish for certain that the police have correctly interpreted the Roads Service policy to refuse to prosecute those caught.

He said: "If the police are correct in what they have told me then we are all wasting our time trying to build a shared society where public property is neutral and the efforts of community groups to clear up a sectarian environment are not in vain.

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"Despite all the much publicised symbolic gestures by party leaders indicating a new beginning there are more and bigger flags than ever including a new crop of loyalist flags in various pockets of East Derry and North Antrim indicating support for the murder and mayhem carried out over many years by both the UFV and the UDA.

"Objectors have removed some of the flags and astonishingly there is an appeal in local papers encouraging anyone with information to contact the police in Coleraine so it seems those taking these flags down could be prosecuted but those who put them up are immune from the law.

"Fourteen years on from the Good Friday Agreement many people are asking what has really changed for Catholic minorities across the North who still have to run the gauntlet of sectarian symbolism on a scale which appears, if one is to judge by the number and size of the flags fluttering from Roads Service lampposts or the volume of paint on kerbstones, appears to have escalated."

(CD/GK)