The Sinn Fein president has repeated his conviction that even at this late stage the crisis over decommissioning and the imminent suspension of the institutions of the Belfast Agreement can be averted.
On a visit to Queen's University, Belfast, yesterday he gave a lukewarm response to Bishop Seamus Hegarty's proposal to accept arms from the IRA and was non-committal about whether a British initiative on demilitarisation might break the political deadlock.
After addressing students he said that the institutions should not be suspended. "I see no reason why the Executive should be collapsed, or why David Trimble should resign," he said.
Mr Adams said he wanted to find a way out of "perpetual crisis" and create a situation where there were no armed guns and no armed groups. However, any solution had to be "definitive and conclusive", he said.
Mr Adams said the British government had failed to meet its obligation to demilitarise. "We would be in a far better situation if the Good Friday agreement had been implemented, as it should have, by all of the parties, but not least by the British government on the issue of demilitarisation," he said. However, he said: "Whether it would help in resolving this particular problem I can't say."
Mr Adams also elaborated on his apparent suggestion that he personally, or Sinn Fein generally, would walk away from the political process if there were no resolution of the current impasse. "We can't keep running ragged. From our point of view we have made five or six efforts since Good Friday to sort this out, and every one of them has been rejected in one way or other," he said.
"It is just not physically, or intellectually or emotionally possible for me to keep running after a process which does not have the engagement of other players, where the other players are going to say, `Try again, try again, try again'," Mr Adams added.
"We are a political party in our own right, and if this goes down - and my effort must be to make sure it does not go down - then we will have to reflect very seriously about whether we want to be scape-goated again on an issue that we have tried to resolve, while others have refused to resolve it," he said.
Mr Adams said Bishop Seamus Hegarty's proposal to act as a guarantor of some IRA arms being put beyond use was well intended but he believed such initiatives were "better dealt with privately, because then we get some sense of their value as opposed to their becoming an issue of public controversy".
About 500 students and lecturers gathered in Queen's to hear Mr Adams speak and take questions on the topic, "Talking to One's Opponents". Another 30 students, standing behind a placard declaring "No Terrorists in Government", demonstrated against him outside the lecture building.
Mr Adams said that the present difficulties could be overcome but warned against putting the Executive and institutions on hold. "If the Ulster Unionist Party pulls the plug on this and Peter Mandelson suspends the institutions I just don't know how it can be sorted out," he said.
