The transfer of powers from the Westminster Parliament to the new institutions provided for in the Belfast Agreement is to take place in less than six weeks time. Yet the days slip inexorably by with no resolution in sight on the issue which could render those same institutions inoperable. The decommissioning of paramilitary weapons remains as much an obstacle now as it did six months ago, cemented in position by the obduracy of the IRA and the insistence of the Ulster Unionists that they will not sit in government alongside those who maintain a private, armed wing.
Mr David Trimble has indicated the strategy he will follow if the British government tries to call the executive into being with cabinet seats allocated to Sinn Fein members. He will not wait for an initiative by his critics on the unionist right but will himself move to have Sinn Fein excluded and to have the Assembly effectively "parked" while he seeks a review of its operations. Mr Trimble has declared that he has taken matters as far as he can. That claim is credible. He has shown remarkable flexibility and openness as to how and when the IRA might show its commitment to exclusively peaceful methods. There has been no reciprocation on the part of Sinn Fein or the IRA. Three successive IRA statements have insisted there will be no decommissioning. There has been no response to calls for the organisation to formally declare an irrevocable end to "the war". Notwithstanding the requirement in the Agreement that decommissioning be completed early next year, there has not even been an indication that it is willing to agree a timetable for that process. Yet successive Sinn Fein speakers insist it is unionist intransigence which prevents the terms of the Agreement from being fulfilled.
At the weekend, Mr Martin Ferris of Sinn Fein, formerly an IRA gunrunner, repeated the line, declaring that Mr Trimble "must move speedily to end the uncertainty and to settle unionism". The First Minister, he said, could easily move the peace process forward by setting up the executive. He then went on to make the disingenuous claim that Mr Trimble commands a "two-thirds, cross-party majority in the assembly" and is "much stronger" than the DUP and the anti-agreement unionists.
The reality, which Mr Ferris evades with the canard that Mr Trimble commands two-thirds of the assembly, is that he has only a marginal edge among the unionist members as a whole and that he is hemmed in by the dissidents within his own party. Moreover, even his own loyal members would be likely to desert him if he were to do as Mr Ferris recommends. It is impossible to visualise any way in which Mr Trimble could capitulate to Sinn Fein and the IRA on this issue and survive as leader of the Ulster Unionists.
Considerable pressure is being brought to bear upon Mr Trimble to yield. The Labour Party leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn and the chairwoman of the Alliance Party, Mrs Eileen Bell, are among those who have argued that the forward momentum of the process requires him to swallow his objections and to enter an executive side by side with Sinn Fein Ministers. SDLP spokespersons have been less explicit, pointing out the requirement for both sides to move forward in order to ensure the implementation of the Agreement. Yet the Government has conspicuously held back from urging Mr Trimble to abandon his stance. The Taoiseach has held all along that Sinn Fein and the IRA have more political room to manoeuvre than Mr Trimble. He said he believed that Sinn Fein had something concrete with which to go to the IRA once the structure of the executive had been agreed and Sinn Fein's two seats had been earmarked and reserved. Yet there has been no response from Sinn Fein. The Taoiseach is only too well aware that what is now at issue is whether to yield the very citadel of democracy.
It is one thing for Irish Government Ministers to meet Sinn Fein representatives who have been elected to the assembly or who act as spokespersons for that party. It would be quite another to sit down to do business, equal to equal, with ministers of a new Northern Ireland Executive whose private armouries are filled with deadly weapons and who intend that they will remain so. How could a Dublin Minister work hand-in-hand with a Northern Ireland counterpart who sits on the Army Council of the IRA?