The Northern Ireland peace process is being held up by a "couple of hundred hoods", Ulster Unionist leader Mr David Trimble said today.
In an interview to mark five years since the Belfast Agreement, Mr Trimble said the political process was in danger of "crashing" again if the British Government continued to "drift".
Asked if the process was dead, Mr Trimble said: "What is dead is the attempts being made by the Government over the course of the last month or two to see if there is a basis in which the Assembly can be reformed.
"That huge effort involving the British Government, the Irish Government, with the US Government... in support, that has failed."
The IRA has sent a statement to the British and Irish Governments which Sinn Fein president Mr Gerry Adams has insisted is "clear and unambiguous" and was unparalleled in its significance.
But Mr Trimble said republicans had not delivered what was expected of them. He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "Why is it that the expectations and the assurances given by the republican leadership at the beginning of March, why have they not delivered on them?
"We should now seek some answers as to why they failed. "The rest of us perhaps maybe need to address some fundamental issues that arise out of the failure of the republican movement.
"How is the Northern Ireland Assembly going to function? Is it going to stay completely there in suspense because if it is what on earth are we doing conducting an election?
"If we are conducting an election how is it going to function because what's the point of an election to something that doesn't function? The Government needs to think about that and produce an answer very, very quickly.
"I don't think we are ever going to go back to the bad old days in the full sense of that word because so much has changed in society in Northern Ireland, and things have got better in a quite remarkable way across the board.
"What we've got is a couple of hundred people who don't want to give up the old ways and who still benefit from the old ways particularly in terms of racketeering.
"If we see it as being just the problem of a couple of hundred hoods I think we see the way forward more clearly. There has always been a danger that the Assembly could crash and it was suspended in order to avoid such a crash."
"I think Government have to make sure that they don't bring about a crash at a future date by sort of continuing to drift on the matter," he said.
PA