Renewed pressure on IRA to disarm

Renewed pressure was put on the IRA to disarm today as Sinn Fein leaders met in Dublin to discuss the faltering Northern Ireland peace process.

Mark Durkan, the SDLP’s Finance Minister in the Stormont Executive, said another verbal assurance from the IRA on decommissioning would not be enough to safeguard the future of devolved Government in Northern Ireland.

He said there would have to be an indication of progress on the arms issue rather than "more fine-sounding words" before the power-sharing administration could be stabilised.

His comments came as Gardai uncovered a stockpile of dissident republican weapons close to the border and as loyalist attacks on Catholic homes continued in Belfast.

Sinn Fein’s executive, meanwhile, met in Dublin to discuss the Weston Park talks between the British and Irish Governments and pro-Good Friday Agreement parties which ended last weekend without finding a breakthrough.

A take it or leave it package is expected to be put to the parties by the Governments shortly after the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, declared after the Weston Park talks that the time for negotiation was over.

Mr Durkan said movement by the IRA on decommissioning was what was needed to unlock the peace process, not words.

He said: "I don’t think people are going to rely merely on verbals because the verbals to date haven’t translated into as much progress as people would have wanted to see.

"I don’t believe on the basis of just some more fine sounding words that that is going to be enough to give us the basis for securing the full implementation of the Agreement.

"The best that can happen with simply more verbals is that people will say 'OK we will have to test that in a month’s time or two month’s time' and we will be back into the exact sort of impasse we are in.

"We can’t run the Agreement on this sort of stop-go way."

Meanwhile, Gardai investigating the activities of dissident hardline republican groups uncovered an arms cache close to the Co Donegal border with Northern Ireland.

The find was made near the town of Lifford and included a plastic drum packed with 100lb of home-made explosives, a detonator, three timing units, 18 feet of cortex, two handguns and 100 rounds of ammunition.

The haul was believed to have been stored by the Real IRA, the group that carried out the 1998 mass murder bomb attack on Omagh, Co Tyrone, ahead of a probable terror strike across the border.

A search of the area was continuing.

In Belfast loyalist attacks on Catholic homes continued when a pipe bomb exploded at the rear of a house at Westland Gardens in the north of the city.

The family who live in the house returned from a holiday in the morning to discover their home had been targeted for the second time in less than a week.

The pipe bomb shattered windows in the back of the house and also in the garage of a Protestant neighbour.

Earlier police and troops patrolling the flashpoint between the nationalist Short Strand and the loyalist Newtownards Road in east Belfast seized a stockpile of primed petrol bombs and paint bombs on the loyalist side of the interface.

What police described as a substantial quantity of materials for making more devices was also recovered.

Meanwhile, a 17-year-old was recovering after being shot in what appeared to be a loyalist paramilitary style attack in the Donegall Road area of Belfast.

He was taken hospital suffering from a single bullet wound to the left leg after being attacked in Lower Rockview Street.