The Northern Ireland Secretary, Dr John Reid, has said the IRA ceasefire was "not enough" to ensure confidence in its commitment to peace and there must be a real sense "that the war is over".
In an explicit demand that the IRA end paramilitary attacks and targeting and run down the "apparatus of terrorism", Dr Reid told MPs during Northern Ireland Questions in the Commons yesterday that four years after the signing of the Belfast Agreement it was not acceptable for the preparations for terrorism to continue.
As the Conservatives insisted that the peace process was now "on trial", the Northern Ireland Secretary reiterated his belief that the republican leadership was committed to the peace process.
However, those who shared in government had a "particular and a special responsibility" to the political process. "They have to be free of the taint of any association with the apparatus or the activity of paramilitaries," Dr Reid said.
Declaring that confidence generated by the IRA's second act of decommissioning had been "totally dissipated" by republican activity in recent weeks, of which the St Patrick's Day break-in at the Castlereagh police complex was "merely a part", the Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble, insisted it was "a little mealy-mouthed" simply to call for a "sense" that the IRA's war was over.
It would be more productive, he said, to call on the IRA and all other paramilitary organisations to declare the war was over "and, moreover, eight years after the first ceasefire it's about time you started to disband".
Dr Reid insisted his comments and Mr Trimble's were not "mutually exclusive" but "the one way to make sure that something doesn't happen is for a British Secretary of State to demand it".
"If there is going to be a sustained confidence in this whole process then people need to be assured and need to have the perception that not only has there been a cessation of firing, which has happened . . . but also a cessation of the preparation for firing at some future stage. That is the kernel of the present lack of confidence."
The republican leadership, he added, "must understand now that this is beginning to seriously affect people's confidence in the process".
Responding to the Conservative spokesman on Northern Ireland, Mr Quentin Davies, who asked whether or not recent IRA activity was consistent with their ceasefire and obligations under the Belfast Agreement, Dr Reid repeated his assertion that the ceasefire was not sufficient to maintain confidence in the political process.
He added: "I have already said that I do not believe that is the case, that activity related to intention or preparation of violence is inhibiting to the confidence of the process."