The Belfast Agreement's future can be secured by multi-party talks and the reconvening of a peace and reconciliation forum in Dublin next week, it was claimed today.
SDLP deputy leader Ms Bríd Rodgers said the Dublin talks offered the best hope of addressing concerns about power sharing, future IRA activity, loyalist paramilitarism and so-called punishment attacks.
She was speaking after yesterday's decision by the pro-Agreement parties and the Irish and British Governments to resume talks next week.
Ms Rodgers also called on the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, which has been reconvened by the Government next week, to "make it clear that an end to republican paramilitaries is not just a unilateral demand of unionism or a high-handed demand of the British government".
In an address to Friends of the SDLP in the US city of Boston, the former Stormont Agriculture Minister said that ironically the greatest threat to the Agreement had come from those who had signed it in 1998.
Among the problems she cited were: "The 18 months delay by Ulster Unionists in setting up the Executive; the schizophrenic nature of the pro-Agreement unionist leadership - half supporting the Agreement, half threatening its collapse; and the heavy concentration by the same leadership on ending IRA violence while ignoring the murder and intimidation of innocent Catholics by loyalist paramilitaries until they turned their guns on each other.
"All of this contributed to a confidence deficit in the nationalist community.
"The confidence of pro-Agreement unionists has been eroded by the endless prevarication of republicans on decommissioning as they attempted to stave off the inevitable," Ms Rodgers said.
"Confidence has been shattered further by the continued activity of the IRA, not least the apparent IRA spy ring - the existence of which Sinn Fein no longer denies". Nationalists were angry with the IRA too over its activities, she said.
PA