The Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Northern Secretary have made a strong appeal to the parties in Belfast to make, what they call, one last enormous effort to reach agreement on the decommissioning issue over the next 10 days. After talks lasting more than an hour in Dublin, Mr. Andrews called on the Northern parties to recreate the mood of Good Friday, when the seemingly impossible had become possible.
According to the Governments, the absolute reality was that there was no alternative to the approach set out in the accord. The Northern Secretary said that, while no-one was underestimating the difficulties, she was calling on the parties to take one extra step that would mean an agreement before the deadline of the end of the month. Mo Mowlam warned that, if agreement was not reached, then the Belfast accord would unravel, and that, she said, would be very dangerous.
The dissident Ulster Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson has said that decommissioning was a political imperative and he hoped that the IRA would demonstrate in tangible terms that it was committed to exclusively peaceful means. Speaking to RTÉ news, he said that in the absence of decommissioning the SDLP and the Unionist parties should go ahead with the formation of an executive, excluding Sinn Féin until they had honoured their obligations. Mr. Donaldson maintained that his party believes in 'inclusivity' based on democratic principles and that it was not interested in a token gesture by the IRA. He said that there is no room for fudge on this issue.
It emerged today that Mr. Donaldson, has been invited back onto his party's negotiating team for talks due to start this week under Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair. The move is seen to reflect a hardening of the Unionist position on decommissioning.
