The SDLP leader has made an unprecedented attack on the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, and on the Northern Secretary of State, Dr John Reid. Mr Mark Durkan accused Mr Blair of "sermonising" during his speech to business leaders in Belfast on Thursday and also claimed that Dr Reid was "relishing" direct rule.
Mr Durkan also cautioned the London and Dublin governments against "opening private lines to private armies" and said both governments should "for a change" manage the political process in the North properly.
He called for all-party talks to start immediately, saying: "We need to be sitting down around the table together. We don't need to be sitting down listening to Tony Blair sermonising from the pulpit. As far as I'm concerned round-table talks could be put in place very quickly.
"I don't believe there's an appetite for that on the part of the British government, and that worries me. I am perturbed that the Secretary of State seems to be relishing direct rule already. He seems to be planning for a long haul in terms of direct rule and he seems to have very few plans in terms of bringing the political parties together to complete this agreement," he said.
"The SDLP did not say we would vote against exclusion in the Assembly only to settle for the exclusion of the pro-agreement parties from what needs to be done. This is not going to be sorted on the basis of the governments opening private lines to private armies and excluding everybody else.
"I think this is part of the confidence issue that the Secretary of State and the British government have to sort out. And it's not just for the British government, it's for both governments, because I've had talks with other pro-agreement parties, and this is a common concern that is being expressed by politicians across the range of parties.
"I'm only saying openly what we're talking about privately, and the British government needs to understand that if they think that everything can wait until they square things out with the Provisional IRA and until they have all sorts of sidebar negotiations with Sinn Féin to everyone else's exclusion, they're only going to compound the problem that we have.
"The thing that has alienated and disaffected unionists hasn't been the agreement, hasn't been the operation of the institutions of the Executive, hasn't been the North-South Ministerial Council. It has been the sense that there is a process that involves lots of secret concessions to one side and very little for everyone else.
"So they will be compounding that very problem about the process, and what the two governments have to get right this time is to manage the process properly for a change. It has been the mistaken management of the process that has damaged the agreement in the past, and it has been used by anti-agreement people to misrepresent the agreement in a very bad light.
"My question is: do the governments trust the pro-agreement parties to include and involve all the pro-agreement parties very early on in an all-in exercise and in an all-out effort to deal with all of these issues?
"There is no point in the Prime Minister or anybody else sermonising us about all the issues and then saying we're not allowed to do anything about them, that we're not to get together on those issues. There is very little that Tony Blair said that I couldn't have said, that anybody else couldn't have said," Mr Durkan concluded.