Dáil that the British-Irish Agreement had entered into force (including certain supplementary agreements concerning the Belfast Agreement). Speaking at the 1998 commemoration of the Easter Rising of 1916, Ahern said: The Assembly and Executive were eventually established in December 1999 on the understanding that decommissioning would begin immediately, but were suspended within two months due to lack of progress, before being re-established in May 2000 as Provisional IRA decommissioning eventually began. Aside from the decommissioning issue, however, ongoing paramilitary activity (albeit relatively low-level compared to the past) by the Provisional Irish Republican Army—e.g., arms importations, smuggling, organised crime, "punishment beatings", intelligence-gathering and rioting—was also a stumbling block. The loyalist paramilitaries also continued similar activity although as they were not represented by a significant political party, their position was less central to political change. The overall result of these problems was to damage confidence among unionists in the agreement, which was expressed by the anti-agreement DUP. The DUP eventually overtook the pro-agreement UUP in the 2003 Assembly election. The UUP had already resigned from the power-sharing Executive in 2002 following the Stormontgate scandal, which saw three men charged with intelligence-gathering. These charges were eventually dropped in 2005 on the controversial grounds that pursuit would not be "in the public interest". Immediately afterwards, one of the accused Sinn Féin members, Denis Donaldson, was exposed as a British agent. In 2004, negotiations were held between the two governments, the DUP, and Sinn Féin on an agreement to re-establish the institutions. These talks failed, but a document published by the governments detailing changes to the Belfast Agreement became known as the "Comprehensive Agreement". On 26 September 2005, it was announced that the Provisional Irish Republican Army had completely decommissioned its arsenal of weapons and "put them beyond use". Nonetheless, many unionists notably the DUP, remained sceptical. Of the loyalist paramilitaries, only the Loyalist Volunteer Force had decommissioned any weapons. Further negotiations took place in October 2006, leading to the St Andrews Agreement. In May 2007, a power-sharing executive was again established to govern Northern Ireland in devolved matters. The second Northern Ireland Executive had Ian Paisley of the DUP as First Minister and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin as deputy First Minister in a diarchy. Paisley retired from the office of First Minister and from the leadership of the DUP on 5 June 2008 and was succeeded in both functions by Peter Robinson. In