New push to break peace deadlock

Intensive efforts to achieve a breakthrough in the North’s peace process were due to continue today as Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists try to bridge the remaining gaps between them.

Hopes have been rising in recent days that the two parties could forge a deal which would enable a pre-Christmas Assembly election to take place in Northern Ireland.

However Taoiseach Bertie Ahern yesterday cautioned against over optimism.

Mr Ahern said at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown, Co Kildare, that a deal was not at this stage guaranteed.

“It is not a done deal,” he said. “There are at least three different issues that we need to resolve.”

Talk sources said they were encouraged by the mood of the current negotiations but echoed Mr Ahern’s caution.

A source said: “Certainly David Trimble’s speech at his party conference and the reaction of Sinn Féin to it has been encouraging.

“It is also good that negotiations between the Ulster Unionists and Sinn Féin are continuing.

“However we are not counting our chickens just yet.”

There has been speculation in recent days that if a deal enabling a November election were to be struck, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister would visit Northern Ireland to mark it.

Mr Ahern has publicly set Wednesday as a key date for the parties to reach agreement.

But it was unclear whether Mr Blair’s illness would affect the deadline for a breakthrough in the process.

Talk sources were encouraged by remarks from Sinn Féin chairman Mitchel McLaughlin that all sides needed to deal with the “legacy of the conflict” now that the war on the streets of Northern Ireland was a thing of the past.

They also believe that Mr Trimble’s signal that he needed republicans to give a sense that paramilitarism was being abandoned soon had also helped improve the mood of the negotiations.