The Northern Executive and Assembly appear to be on the verge of collapse following claims by senior security and political sources that the IRA last year infiltrated an agent into the heart of the Northern Ireland Office to gather highly sensitive intelligence, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
The claims were made after police raided the Sinn Féin offices at Stormont and a number of other premises yesterday. Hundreds of documents were recovered in the raids.
The information in them is believed to relate more to political affairs than to security matters. The material was confidential and, according to sources, included reports, analyses and minutes on major political matters relating to the peace process in the North.
Officials believe that some of the correspondence was between the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Dr John Reid and the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair.
Four people - three men and a woman - were arrested in yesterday's raids. One of them is suspected of being an IRA infiltrator who photo-copied documents. The four were still being questioned late last night.
London, Dublin and pro-Belfast Agreement politicians are growing increasingly fearful that political crisis cannot now be avoided.
This latest debacle came on the day that the case against three Irish men opened in Colombia in an atmosphere of partial farce and as security sources again insisted the IRA was responsible for the Castlereagh break-in, all adding to the heightening sense of political fatalism.
A leading security source in Belfast told The Irish Times last night that: "Police are very, very confident about the strength of their case. You can expect serious charges in the next couple of days."
Police are understood to have been tracking the case since September last year. Dr Reid was aware of possible criminal charges arising before July this year when he warned the republican movement that it could face sanctions were it found to be involved in issues similar to the allegations surrounding Colombia and Castlereagh.
The suspected IRA infiltrator worked as a messenger at the offices of Dr Reid at Castle Buildings, Stormont, for 18 months and left the service in September last year.
The North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, is exerting pressure on the British government to take punitive action against Sinn Féin and the IRA, failing which he may withdraw his ministers from the Northern Executive.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and Mr Blair meet in London on Wednesday, conscious that the peace process has been thrown into crisis and that the only means of warding off total political collapse may be to suspend the Executive, Assembly and institutions of the agreement in the hope that in the medium or longer term the situation can be retrieved.
Mr Trimble, in a series of interviews yesterday, implicitly warned that if Dr Reid did not penalise Provisional republicans, he could bring down the Executive well ahead of the initial deadline for such action laid by down the Ulster Unionist Council.
"It looks as though there has been an intelligence operation directed against the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and it looks as though his offices have been penetrated and sensitive information been taken. I think that's even bigger than Watergate," Mr Trimble told the BBC.
There must be a "clear response to this from John Reid and Tony Blair", he added.
Sinn Féin MLA Mr Gerry Kelly said the police raids and arrests were politically motivated. He said the legal rights of those arrested were being jeopardised because there appeared to be a presumption that they were guilty.