Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said yesterday he believed the IRA will decommission weapons soon.
But he insisted that even with decommissioning and an end to criminality, the IRA would remain an illegal organisation because of its constitution.
He said Gen John de Chastelain's commission would supervise a process which would "begin, middle and end in the relatively near future".
He expected, he said, that decommissioning would be in "one sequence of events" and in "fairly rapid order".
However, he did not expect it all to be done by "one single press of a button, or one single act of decommissioning at one single place".
Mr McDowell insisted that even if the IRA engaged in full decommissioning and ended its involvement in criminality, it would remain an illegal organisation. "The IRA remains an illegal organisation because its constitution is treasonable under the laws of the State. It suggests that the IRA army council is the legitimate government of the State and the Government to which I have been elected, for instance, is illegitimate," he added.
On whether he trusted the IRA army council and its political leadership, particularly Gerry Adams, he said: "I have to operate on the basis of what I would describe as a minimum degree of a working relationship. If somebody says I want to participate in the democratic process, and if they also say I am giving up all forms of violence, then in those circumstances I will operate with them on that premise. Whether that amounts to moral trust is irrelevant, and the same applies to the unionists in Northern Ireland."
He added it was a working assumption, but he was circumspect "because you know what happened relating to the Northern bank robbery, we know what happened relating to the difficulties they had with Robert McCartney, the IRA army council authorising a statement offering his sisters that they would shoot the perpetrators".
Asked by Gerald Barry on the This Week radio programme how it would be known that the IRA had got rid of all its guns, Mr McDowell said Gen De Chastelain had an estimated inventory from the Republic's Government.
"Obviously, in one technical sense, it is impossible for him, you, or me, or anybody else, to know what is hidden somewhere under a stone in a cave in the middle of some mountain range.
"We cannot be certain, but the significant thing is that they get rid of this very significant armoury which they accumulated from arms importation from Libya, the US and eastern Europe, the Semtex, the surface-to-air missiles, all of those things they are to get rid of now."
Mr McDowell said he had always been of the view that in recent years the maintenance of the IRA's arsenal was, in fact, an extreme negative from the point of view of the Provisionals' strategy. He said that post 9/11 and the Omagh bombing, having an arsenal was a huge liability for them.
