The IRA will not decommission weapons until there is substantial movement on the issues of policing and demilitarisation, according to senior republican sources here yesterday.
The sources indicated, however, that this did not mean the offer to decommission was off the table. It might be withdrawn if the IRA suspected the British government was backing away from the Belfast Agreement. Yet in the meantime the offer to decommission, which would be a momentous event in Northern Ireland politics, remains in place.
The Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams, yesterday said there was growing frustration in the nationalist/republican community about what he said was the "remilitarisation" of parts of the North.
The Sinn Fein Assembly member for Mid Tyrone, Mr Francie Molloy, said there had been a significant increase in the number of regular British army and Royal Irish Regiment (RIR) patrols in nationalist areas of Tyrone.
The party's representative in south Armagh, Mr Conor Murphy, said there was still heavy helicopter traffic in south Armagh, and checkpoints had been increased. He said the RUC and army had established a permanent checkpoint in Bessbrook. He received regular complaints about security forces activity.
Yesterday Sinn Fein seemed exasperated by its experiences of the last week. Mr Adams was almost scathing about the handling by the Northern Secretary, Dr John Reid, of events. He dismissed as lightweight Dr Reid's suggestion that a political solution was "tantalisingly close".
Sinn Fein was also scathing about the British suggestion that the Assembly was not suspended but has been reinstated and would remain a working entity throughout the six-week moratorium set by the British government.
The party said it was an Assembly without a First Minister. The Taoiseach could not call for a Council of Ministers meeting. Sinn Fein Ministers could not carry out their functions.
The Weston Park talks were a farce in the party's eyes. One senior Sinn Fein source said the two governments spent the first three days trying to work out a joint position.
The source said that after the Weston Park talks broke up to allow unionists to return for July 12th celebrations, the governments were forced to reissue stale proposals on policing reform and demilitarisation.
Sinn Fein is extremely wary of the policing and demilitarisation proposals. It said the policing proposals did not contain a ban on plastic bullets which have killed 14 people in the North, about half of them children.
There was still no indication of how the British government intended to fulfil the Patten recommendations on the District Police Partnership Boards, under which there would be local governmental input into policing.
It said the governments' proposition that Sinn Fein should appoint members to a Northern Ireland Policing Board, the oversight committee for the new police service, was ridiculous under such circumstances.
The proposals on demilitarisation were tempered with provisos that observation posts would be removed when the Chief Constable of the RUC said so.
The British implementation plan, when it was published shortly, would contain provisos for reserving powers for the Chief Constable and Northern Secretary which would not, in nationalist eyes, correspond with any notion of open, accountable policing. The government proposal, the source said, "has limited democratic control and maximum reserve power. It doesn't bring you anywhere near Patten."
There is also the issue of the proposed inquiry by an international juror into the "disputed killings", including those of the Catholic solicitors Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson.
They have been included for inspection along with the deaths of the loyalist Billy Wright and two RUC superintendents who were killed by the IRA after visiting Dundalk Garda station.
Sinn Fein is concerned by the proposal to lump all the deaths together. It said the Finucane case was of an officer of the courts being killed by people acting in concert with state forces, in this instance the involvement of elements of British military intelligence with the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).
Sinn Fein is also aggrieved that the Northern Secretary did not intervene when unionists moved to illegally block the two Sinn Fein Ministers, Ms Bairbre de Brun and Mr Martin McGuinness, from attending cross-Border meetings in the Republic.
The sources said this was all "hugely insulting" to Sinn Fein and its constituents. "There is no room for manoeuvre," the source said. Despite all the annoyance being registered by republicans, however, there was no indication that the IRA was sufficiently perturbed to withdraw its decommissioning offer or break off contact with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD).
The IRA offer to decommission was "there in reality", the sources insisted. They could not say for certain whether it would remain on the table.
But, crucially, it was clear that republicans are prepared for now to keep the offer of decommissioning on the table. This is because they are almost certain in the knowledge that no real unionist leader or Northern Secretary could dismiss the possibility of achieving IRA decommissioning for want of agreement on matters as seemingly straightforward as local input into policing and the removal of a few army bases.