Decommissioning should not be set as a precondition to the establishment of "good government", according to the co-leader of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, Mrs Monica McWilliams.
At the party's first conference in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, at the weekend, Mrs McWilliams admitted she was "concerned" at the current stalemate surrounding decommissioning.
"I am concerned and I am worried about the ties and times that we are entering because no decisions are being made. We have broken a deadline and we are passing on week after week," she said.
Mrs McWilliams said she believed paramilitary decommissioning would occur within the two-year deadline set out in the agreement. "All parties committed themselves to that agreement, and now we must go forward. We have got to stop this vacuum. Vacuums create tension, tension creates death," she told over 100 party delegates on Saturday.
The Assembly member for South Belfast described the Belfast agreement as a baby, born on April 10th. "Very like a new baby, it needs to be nurtured, it needs to be cared for. As much care needs to go into the implementation of it as went into the creation of it, and perhaps we've forgotten how to nurture it," she said.
Mrs McWilliams, who co-leads the party along with fellow Assembly member Ms Jane Morrice, said the time had come for women to grasp the nettle of power. "Women had been accustomed to being the watchers and the waiters. Today we are ready to govern and lead - and lead we must.
"There are difficult choices in front of us and enormous uncertainties. But I would rather have the uncertainties of the present than the chaos and the conflict of the past," she said.
Mrs McWilliams warned those hampering the process: "You will not, nor should not wreck our agreement. We are the new politicians and we are committed to making sure that our agreement is implemented". It was a "tremendous time and a wonderful day" to be part of the Women's Coalition. She outlined how far the party had come from its inception in April 1996. The Women's Coalition had not just changed the "mainstream, malestream culture of Northern Ireland" but was becoming one of the "serious political players".
"Who would have thought two years ago that we would be standing in front of you today as a fully-fledged party in the new Northern Ireland Assembly? We take our seats in that Assembly equal to all other parties," she said.
The university professor said she did not believe the Belfast Agreement would have been possible without the hard work that the Women's Coalition had put into the negotiations. "I say that because others have reflected on it," she said.
"We understood what it was like to be different, what it was like to be excluded. That's why we worked so hard to have others included. So it was from those principles of inclusion and bringing others in from the cold that we brought those words and that commitment to the negotiation process."
Mrs McWilliams paid tribute to the leaders of the parties involved in the peace talks. "They took enormous risks, and leadership is what Northern Ireland has truly waited for and we've finally found it," she said.
She praised the Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam. "She made an outstanding commitment to Northern Ireland. She was a working-class woman and she never forgot what it was like to struggle." She had taught the North how to "strive and thrive".
A campaigner against domestic violence, Mrs McWilliams said she was particularly proud of the party's achievement of having the victims of violence written into the agreement. "We got it in and we worked all that last night to make sure that it was in." Referring to the parades issue, she outlined the role she envisaged for the Women's Coalition in the new era of reconciliation. She described her "absolute delight" at having been the first Catholic woman invited by the Orange Order to address it on the resolution of the parades issue in the Order's Belfast headquarters.
"I will go anywhere and meet anyone, if asked and if invited, to help with all of the issues in my community as well as in the new departmental structures of government. It has to be people and parties together," she said.
She also outlined the "unique opportunity" on offer to Northern Ireland to create a "new model of government, new standards for democracy and the new civic principles of tolerance and equal opportunity".