The president of Sinn Fein, Mr Gerry Adams, has told Noraid members in the US that he wants President Clinton and the British government to start working for Irish unity "when things settle down".
Winding up his four-day US tour, Mr Adams said that when he met the President last Friday at the White House he told him that Northern Ireland could not be left in a state of limbo following the constitutional changes written into the Belfast Agreement.
The Sinn Fein leader, who had a 25-minute meeting with Mr Clinton, did not indicate the President's reaction to his remarks.
He said that he expected people in the political system in the US to let Britain know that the US and Irish-Americans wanted "to move the situation from the state of limbo into one where the people of Ireland can live free from division and partition".
Mr Adams, addressing the annual conference in Hartford, Connecticut, of the Irish Northern Aid Committee, usually known as Noraid, said that "some assistance has to be given in terms of stabilising the situation of David Trimble", the Ulster Unionist Party leader.
"But when that has been stabilised, the North cannot be left in a state of limbo because in the Good Friday Agreement we moved the British to repealing the Government of Ireland Act. The partition act is gone," Mr Adams said to applause.
Once things had stabilised in the short term, he said, "the logic of the situation was that the British government has to take up a position of working with people in Ireland to bring about Irish unity, not just talking about it rhetorically, but actually moving to working with the Irish Government and the rest of us". He warned his audience that this would be resisted by the "No men" of unionism.