Stormont stalemate as rivals bicker

ANOTHER DIFFICULT day in the Northern Ireland talks on arms decommissioning at Stormont yesterday led to the postponement of today's possible intervention by Tony Blair and the Irish premier, Bertie Ahern.

The two prime ministers are believed to be on stand-by to travel to Belfast if their presence would help clinch a deal, but yesterday brought no new signs of any breakthrough on the arms issue. They may join proceedings next week if things improve.

Yesterday's discussions - like the previous day's talks - were devoted more to the venting of complaints than the production of any constructive new ideas. But the exchanges were said to have been reasonably even-tempered.

The current talks seem destined, like so many other Belfast negotiating sessions, to spend some days going through apparently unproductive wrangling before the real crunch is reached. A source said: "There's no point in forcing the pace if the parties are not ready yet to do business."

The atmosphere in the talks was not helped by some hardline rhetoric delivered to the media at Stormont. The Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, challenged both the British and Irish governments to state publicly whether they had abandoned the Good Friday Agreement in favour of the draft declaration which emerged from the Hillsborough talks at the start of this month.

He said: "Almost two million people voted last year for the Good Friday Agreement. They are entitled to know0 the governments' intentions." Republicans are much in favour of the Good Friday document, which was vague on decommissioning, and much against the draft declaration, which laid down that it was a necessity.

Mo Mowlam. the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, quickly responded that the Agreement was the fundamental backstop defining the activities of the governments. She declared: "It is not a case of one against the other. One is a fundamental document while the other is a means of trying to find a way forward."

During the day, some minor parties which had been assumed to be in support of the draft declaration were critical of it, and of the way the Government had allegedly issued it without sufficient consultation.

Minor loyalist parties which represent major loyalist paramilitary organisations have already rejected it.

All this has introduced a certain fluidity into the situation, which some days ago appeared to be a case of Sinn Fein versus the rest. Support for the declaration now seems by no means as widespread as had been thought, though the Ulster Unionists are generally supportive.

That party yesterday rebuked the loyalists for adopting a position close to that of Sinn Fein, and for allegedly uttering implicit threats.

The Ulster Unionist negotiator Reg Empey said: "We're getting further intimidation and threats, and that's coming regretfully both from republican and loyalist sources, whose political ambitions and interests appear to have coincided in the last few days with the joint rejection of the Hillsborough declaration."