The time is right for Adams to confront old republican demons

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair was explicit about the assurances that the IRA have to give if The Good Friday Agreement is to progress at this stage.

Even though Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have been insisting that the IRA statement "was clear an unambiguous", they have engaged in so much prevarication for so long that they appear to have become semantically dyslexic.

We still do not know exactly what the IRA said, but there was an obvious implication in Blair's complaint that instead of expressing clearly the organisation's determination to implement the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, it stated that its strategies and disciplines would not be inconsistent with the agreement.