Irish and British politicians meeting in Co Clare yesterday reaffirmed their belief in the Belfast Agreement amid calls for its full implementation. The British-Ireland Inter parliament ary Body passed a motion at the end of its two-day meeting at Dromoland Castle declaring that the agreement was "the only way towards a new future of peace and co-operation".
The Fine Gael spokesman on Northern Ireland, Mr Charles Flanagan, said if the decommissioning issue was not overcome there would be no executive. If there was no executive, the agreement would be at an end.
"It seems to me that Mr David Trimble has very little, if any, room left to manoeuvre. Sadly, there has not been the same level of movement on the other side. Three statements from the IRA have ruled out decommissioning. The organisation has refused to state that the war is over for good.
"There has not even been a hint that Sinn Fein will facilitate a timetable or a schedule of decommissioning. This must be condemned."
The Sinn Fein TD for Cavan-Monaghan, Mr Caoimhghin O Caolain, said the future of the agreement and the direction of the peace process now depended on the establishment this week of the executive.
"The executive should have been established long before now. That it has not been established is entirely due to the fact that the Ulster Unionist Party has sought to place an obstacle in the way of the full implementation of the agreement.
"That obstacle takes the form of an impossible demand on Sinn Fein as a precondition to our entry into the executive. There is no such precondition in the Good Friday agreement. The precondition demanded is decommissioning of IRA weapons and explosives. We have made it clear that this is a demand we in the Sinn Fein leadership cannot deliver.
"David Trimble knows this. He has done so for months. Both governments know this also."
Mr O Caolain said he acknowledged the difficult compromises involved in the agreement for Mr Trimble and his party. "It was a real achievement for him to bring his party to the negotiating table, to emerge with an agreement and to persuade the majority of his supporters to back it. He has maintained that support since. I believe he has the political authority to implement the agreement in full if he has the political will to do so."
He said there needed to be an acknowledgement from the UUP of the very difficult compromises which Sinn Fein, and Irish nationalists and republicans of diverse political opinion, also had to make in order to create the Belfast Agreement. "This has been obscured in the false argument over decommissioning."
