The DUP has rounded on Mr Gerry Adams after the Sinn Féin president said the British and Irish governments and the pro-Belfast Agreement parties might have to set out an alternative programme for progress over the head of the DUP, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
Mr Adams said the DUP would have an opportunity to demonstrate its "good intentions" in the forthcoming review of the agreement, but it must not be allowed to use the review to unravel the progress already achieved.
Mr Adams said the DUP eventually would make an accommodation with the other parties, including Sinn Féin, but in the meantime the responsibility fell on the two governments "to marshal the pro-agreement forces and implement a strategy to defeat the wreckers and move the process forward.
"The DUP can be moved. And there is no doubt that unionism, even of the Paisleyite kind, will have to face in time the same reality that led the UUP to agree the Good Friday agreement. But this will take too long and the process of change and the rights of citizens cannot wait."
Meanwhile the governments and the pro-agreement parties may have to devise an alternative strategy to overcome the DUP threat, he added.
Mr Adams was also dismissive of claims that last October's sequencing deal that was scheduled to result in a return to devolution collapsed over the absence of transparency about the third act of IRA decommissioning.
"This criticism ignores the enormity of this issue for the IRA and its support base. But more importantly it ignores the Good Friday agreement position on weapons and the role of the IICD [the decommissioning body]. It also ignores the issue of other weapons in use in the hands of unionist paramilitaries and British state forces, as against the IRA's silenced arms," he said.
Mr Adams told students at St Malachy's College, Belfast, on Thursday that there was "undoubtedly a dangerous and deeply worrying sense of drift in the political situation since the Assembly elections in November".
It was "intolerable" that the British and Irish governments had not carried out its commitments, he added, when he called for the reinstatement of the executive and Assembly.
He said there should be movement on demilitarisation, policing, transferring responsibility for justice and policing to a department of justice in the North, and ensuring "people on the run" did not face prison.
Mr Nigel Dodds, the DUP MP for North Belfast, said Mr Adams had a nerve to question the DUP's good intentions in relation to the review of the agreement.
"Our good intentions are not in question. We are committed to working for a stable form of devolution for Northern Ireland. The same cannot be said for Sinn Féin/IRA," he said.
"Is a party allied to a private army that involves itself in murder, mutilation, gun-running, rioting, racketeering, spying and expulsions full of good intentions?
"The ball is in Sinn Fein/IRA's court. The IRA needs to go away," Mr Dodds said.