All sides in the Northern Ireland peace process must return to the deal on decommissioning and devolution which was forged last year Mr Martin McGuinness claimed today.
With the future of the political institutions in Northern Ireland threatened by disputes over disarmament, policing and demilitarisation, Mr McGuinness said nationalists and republicans were "anxious" to see the political institutions work.
"Tremendous work has been done and we want to keep that going," he said.
"Now the big difficulty that we face is that we need to bring about a situation where the, I think, very tremendous statement that was made by the IRA on May 8 last year can be worked out to its logical conclusion.
"That essentially means that we need get back to the May 6 agreement which was made between the IRA and the British government and of course, Gerry Adams and myself were involved in very detailed discussions with Tony Blair and with Bertie Ahern at Hillsborough Castle.
"Our big problem is that Tony Blair has been unable to fulfil the commitments and problems that he made at that time and so we have seen this awful mess that Peter Mandelson has made of the legislation into what should have been a new beginning to policing."
The IRA agreed last year to allow independent inspections of its arms dumps and initiate a process for putting its weapons beyond use in return for the restoration of devolution, the scaling down of army bases and the reform of policing.
But relations between unionists, nationalists, republicans and the British government have soured since then over the IRA's handling of decommissioning, plans for the new police service and demilitarisation.
Unionists are angry that the IRA has allowed only two inspections of its arms dumps and has had little contact with the international commission tasked with disarmament.
Republicans accused the government of reneging on the Hillsborough deal by producing police reforms which fell short of the recommendations made by the Patten Commission and by moving slowly on demilitarisation.
The SDLP has also become embroiled in the policing row and is under pressure to participate in the new policing structures.
Mr McGuinness today called for the government's policing legislation to be amended to return it to the Patten recommendations.
He also dampened down speculation about an imminent breakthrough in the process involving new arrangements for dealing with IRA arms.
According to a Sunday newspaper report, IRA leaders are considering a new plan for putting their weapons "beyond use," with the Irish Government acting as guarantors taking possession of the group's arms, ammunition and explosives.
The Sunday Telegraph claimed that under the new initiative the IRA would inform the Government of the exact location of its sealed arms dumps, but that the Government would not touch them until the IRA had agreed that they should be destroyed.
Mr McGuinness, the Stormont Education Minister, told the BBC's Breakfast at Frostprogramme he was treating the report carefully.
Sinn Fein was committed to the Hillsborough deal, which set out the context in which the IRA could put its weapons beyond use, he said, adding: "We want that to work. We want the new policing service to be set up.
"We want the British government to be involved in a wholehearted process of demilitarisation in areas like South Armagh and other parts of the six counties and we want to move forward to see armed groups putting weapons beyond use.
"Now we had a plan and that plan was May 6 last year. We need to get back to that."
PA