David McKittrick: As trust drains away, the days of the peace process are numbered

Just days ago a lot of people thought the Good Friday Agreement, which is the heart of the Irish peace process, would be lucky to survive intact past January. Now they

think it will be lucky to remain intact for another week. The extraordinary scenes at Stormont, with squads of police in overalls raiding Sinn Fein's offices while a Sinn Fein minister heckled them, have thrown the whole thing into turmoil.

London and Dublin will spend the next few weeks trying to rescue something from the wreckage, but almost everyone involved in the process believe it is about to suffer a serious setback. The widespread opinion is that Unionists will leave the power-sharing executive within weeks and possibly within the next few days, leaving the Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, with little choice but to suspend devolved government.

This would not be the end of the road for the peace process, but it would certainly be a severe jolt to the system. It may well spell the end of one of its central propositions, which is that Unionists and republicans can work together in government.

They have indeed sat side-by-side administering Northern Ireland, but no sense of trust or mutual confidence has been generated between them. Republicans complain that David Trimble and his Ulster Unionists have only ever been half-hearted in their attitudes.

The stance of Trimble's hardline opponents, inside and outside his party, is that he should never have formed the executive in the first place. All of these people are anti-republican; many are simply anti-Catholic. Trimble himself has been tugged both directions, often looking as though he regarded much of the process as personally distasteful. Some think this is why he has not proved an effective salesman for the peace process within Unionism, which in turn helps explain why Protestant support for it has drained away so steadily.

But he has stuck with it, and until recently looked set to lead his party into next May's Assembly elections. Last month, however, the hardliners pretty well tied his hands by having the party make the impossible demand of having the IRA disband by January.

The Stormont raid turned the January showdown into the October crisis. Trimble argued last month that IRA activities such as the Colombian episode – in which three alleged members of the IRA were charged with teaching bomb-making to Marxist rebels – were in a way an encouraging sign that the republican movement had been defeated politically.

He wrote to party delegates that republicans were "distracting the attention of rank-and-file republicans from the extent to which they have changed. In fact, the republican leadership tries to compensate for the collapse of its Irish unity project by allowing their hard men to engage in acts of subversion at home and overseas."

This novel and ingenious assertion left his party unimpressed, and it looked set to propel him out of ministerial office in January. None of its grassroots draw encouragement from continuing IRA activity: rather, they view it as confirming their belief that the republican leopard had not changed its spots, and should not be allowed in government.

Trimble had thus already lost the argument even before the events of Friday. On that day the Stormont police raid really put the tin hat on it, both because it took place and because the television pictures were so dramatic. They imparted the potent message that the authorities, or at least the police, had concluded that the way to deal with Sinn Fein – not the IRA, but Sinn Fein, the ostensibly political people – was with overpowering numbers of heavily armed officers in semi-riot gear.

This was manna from heaven for the Unionist hardliners, providing pictorial support for their argument that republicans are not legitimate politicians but are really unreconstructed terrorists. Tony Blair on the other hand continues strongly to resist such a judgement.

Republicans may have been up to no good in Colombia and possibly in Castlereagh, and they certainly seem to have been reading personal mail to and from John Reid. It is also a fair bet that they have been burrowing away in other areas and collecting intelligence through other agents, as yet unmasked. But the British Prime Minister's attitude to all this has been surprisingly relaxed, perhaps because intelligence gathering is very much a two-way affair. He has established a good working relationship with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, warmly congratulating the Derry republican on becoming a grandfather.

Yet as Blair and Mo Mowlam negotiated with Sinn Fein, it emerged that the intelligence people had bugged Gerry Adams's car: presumably the results of which were passed on to No 10.

First and foremost, however, Blair is motivated by a belief that Sinn Fein leaders are committed to peace, that peace cannot be achieved without them, that the failure of this peace process would be a disaster and that there really is no other show in town.

Dublin agrees with that and so does Washington, which helps explain why all three have been prepared to resist Unionist clamour for Sinn Fein's expulsion from the process. It explains why Blair will spend much of the coming days meeting Trimble, Adams and others. Sinn Fein had already been warned about its spying activities in the summer. Its achievement of being able to photocopy John Reid's mail and other documents came to an end over a year ago, but it is not clear whether or not agents elsewhere continue with similar duplicit duplication.

The prevailing Unionist mindset admits of no doubts, however, and is completely clear that Unionists should not be in government with Sinn Fein. Blair's battle to keep the administration going will be a determined one, but few think he can win it.

Things are so serious that he will be fighting one day at a time to keep the executive just in existence. If he doesn't make it and the government collapses, it is difficult at this moment to see how Humpty Dumpty, once shattered, can be put together again.

The immediate aim would be to give it a soft landing rather than a crash landing, while a longer term strategy is devised to salvage as much as possible from such a setback.

A sense of crisis was already in the air before the high drama of Friday, Unionism having turned so decisively against the Good Friday Agreement. The summer was reasonably quiet, as Northern Ireland summers go, but now the peace process faces a winter of discontent, with further turbulence and instability the only real certainties.