Peace deal falls over IRA weapons row

British Prime Minister Tony Blair faced fresh demands today to release details of the IRA’s latest act of disarmament.

After a peace process deal stumbled over the third act of IRA weapons decommissioning, Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble insisted the package was still “retrievable”.

With Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy expected to make a statement today in the House of Commons about the crisis in the peace process, the Upper Bann MP blamed republicans for the latest problems in the peace process.

“When we started this sequence we knew what the British government was going to say, what [Sinn Féin president Gerry] Mr Adams was going to say.

“The one joker in the pack, the one thing we did not know was what [the head of the international decommissioning body General John] de Chastelain was going to say.

“We were hoping and expecting that de Chastelain would give that transparency to whatever had happened so as to build public confidence.

“That, I am sorry, did not happen and it didn’t happen not because of a failure on John de Chastelain’s part but because republicans had imposed conditions on him that prevented him from doing so.”

General de Chastelain reported yesterday that a significant quantity of IRA arms was put beyond use by the IRA in his presence.

While he would not give any detail on the specifics, the Canadian general said the arsenal included “automatic weapons, ammunition, explosives and explosive material”.

However the general’s failure to give further details stalled a sequence of choreographed events and statements involving the British and Irish governments, Sinn Féin, the IRA and the Ulster Unionists.

Mr Trimble declared that he would not play his part until sufficient clarity was given about the decommissioning act.

This angered Mr Adams, who warned that the process had suffered a “profound” setback.

The West Belfast MP said it was difficult to see how the latest glitch in the process could be resolved in the short term.

He lamented: “There could not have been under any circumstances any misunderstandings at all.

“Do you think that the Prime Minister, the Taoiseach would have flown in here once again had there not been an agreement and had there not been an agreed sequence?”

Confirming Assembly elections in Northern Ireland would go ahead regardless of whether the current problem in the process was resolved, Mr Blair insisted that a significant move had been made by the IRA and that the setback in the process could be resolved.

“I believe that if people view the information that we have been told, then yes, they would be satisfied,” he said at Hillsborough Castle at a joint press conference with Mr Ahern.

However the Prime Minister admitted that a confidentiality clause was invoked by the IRA during the disarmament process.

Mr Trimble called on the British government to release any information it had which could help boost confidence in the disarmament process.

“He should release that information in a bid to help confidence,” the former Stormont First Minister claimed.

With the Assembly election set for November 26, Mr Trimble’s rivals in the Democratic Unionist Party argued that he had proven once again to be a poor negotiator in his talks with republicans.

Nationalist SDLP leader Mark Durkan was also critical of the process which had involved only Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists and the two governments.

He expressed concern that General de Chastelain would become the scapegoat “for the vanities of the Ulster Unionists and the republican movement”.