The North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, has stated that he expected the IRA to honour shortly its pledge to carry out confidence-building measures in relation to its arms.
Failure to do this would make it very difficult to sustain confidence in the resumed devolved administration, he said yesterday.
After the Hillsborough deal was agreed on May 6th, the IRA issued a statement promising to begin a process of "completely and verifiably" putting its arms beyond use. It added that "within weeks" it would carry out a "confidence-building measure to confirm that our weapons remain secure".
The IRA said it would resume contact with Gen John de Chastelain's decommissioning body and that it would allow independent inspection of a number of its arms dumps.
Mr Trimble, at a business launch in Hillsborough yesterday, said he expected the promised confidence-building measure to happen very soon but warned that if the IRA did not move it could have serious consequences. "I think the general expectation is that this will be done. The corollary of that is, if it is not done within weeks, then of course there will be a serious problem with regard to whether confidence can be sustained in the operation," Mr Trimble added.
The Sinn Fein MLA, Mr Gerry Kelly, said he hoped Mr Trimble was not implying he would move to bring down the Executive and the Assembly. "The people who voted for the Good Friday agreement want this to work, and we can't afford any more threats of bringing down the institutions . . . so I hope he does not mean that," he added.
Later yesterday evening, following the weekly meeting of the Executive, Mr Trimble indicated that there was no implied threat in his remarks, rather that he was anticipating the IRA would quickly act on its pledge.
"I don't think it is helpful to dwell on the difficulties that might arise in certain contingencies. If those difficulties arise we will look at them as and when they do . . . there is no need for us to keep on obsessively worrying about certain contingencies which we are all hoping will not occur," he said.
Meanwhile, the North-South element of the Belfast Agreement resumes normal business today. In Dublin, the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, is meeting his Northern counterpart, Mr Mark Durkan, and the Minister of the Environment, Mr Sam Foster, to discuss the workings of the Special European Union Programmes implementation body.
In Belfast yesterday the Northern and Southern Ministers for Health, Ms Bairbre de Brun and Mr Martin respectively, jointly opened the Institute of Public Health in Ireland's conference, although this did not come under the ambit of institutional North-South matters. The Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Peter Mandelson, has again attempted to reassure nationalists and republicans that he has not "binned" or "gutted" the Patten report in the Police Bill, currently working its way through Westminster. Mr Mandelson, in an article in yesterday's Irish News, repeated that the working title of the new police service would not refer to the RUC but that the RUC name would be contained in the "title deeds" of the force. He repeated his willingness to accept amendments to the Bill.
