IT WAS vital that the two governments should keep lines of communication open to Sinn Fein and that Sinn Fein should do the same with the IRA, the SDLP chairman, Mr Jonathan Stephenson, argued yesterday.
Addressing his party's Balmoral branch, Mr Stephenson said the peace could still be saved but only if Sinn Fein could persuade the IRA to commit no further attacks and to renew the ceasefire.
While he shared the widespread horror at the London bombing and understood the instinctive desire to isolate Sinn Fein as a consequence, it was imperative that the party be given "freedom to manoeuvre" in the days ahead.
The SDLP and the two governments could not persuade the IRA that no amount of political frustration justified the taking of human life. Only Sinn Fein could, he said.
Contrary to Mr John Major's demand that Sinn Fein should cut its links with the IRA, Mr Stephenson urged that Sinn Fein should repair those links and use them to do what it could "to drag the IRA back from the abyss".
He said "We now know that the IRA, and the loyalist paramilitaries, have retained their weapons in order to have the option of using them.
"That is true of most parties to a conflict trying to negotiate a peace."In the event of a further ceasefire, the British government must not seek to exclude from all party talks, parties which are close to the thinking of those who hang ion to the guns and the bombs."
In a statement, the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, said the "old agenda of exclusion and unionist triumphalism" was manifest in British policy and unionist rhetoric.
It was a failed agenda which had devalued 18 months of cessation and undermined the peace process.
He said "We all stand at a crossroads. Do we go forward or do we go back? Do we secure inclusive negotiations and agree a permanent settlement or do we stick with the failures of the past?"
A series of meetings involving Northern parties took place at Stormont yesterday as part of the twin track process.
The Northern Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, met an Alliance "Party delegation led by Dr John Alderdice.
A statement from the NIO afterwards said that both sides had condemned the recent bomb attack They had agreed that the search for peace must continue with renewed intensity.
Three smaller parties, the Progressive Unionist Party the Ulster Democratic Party and The Workers Party, also met at Stormont and issued a joint statement. It stressed that the peace process belonged to the people of Northern Ireland "and not solely to the Provisionals".
The three parties called for "public support for the peace rally planned by the Northern Ireland Committee of the ICTU at Belfast City Hall on Friday.