While the British-Irish agreement legislation would bring people together, decommissioning and setting up the executive were the remaining problems, according to the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton.
"The existence of the guns poses a threat," he said, adding that while other political parties committed themselves unreservedly to the democratic path, the republican movement had continued to say that it would maintain its military capacity indefinitely. This was a huge political problem.
The Labour leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, said the republican movement stood on the brink of a historic achievement, participation in the North's government.
Decommissioning, or a gesture of it, "could be undertaken not as an act of surrender to unionism or the British . . ."
Mr Caoimhghin O Caolain (SF, Cavan-Monaghan) said "it is not talking up a crisis to state the plain fact that a crisis now exists in the peace process".
He said both governments had indulged the Ulster Unionist Party in its pretence that the agreement "hinges upon a decommissioning gesture from the IRA. Their false position was given expression in what can only be described as a disgraceful editorial in The Irish Times of yesterday [March 8th] which argued that it would be better that the entire agreement should founder than that decommissioning should not take place in the way that it is being demanded by the unionists."
