Senator George Mitchell will next week convene meetings involving two or more of the North's political parties at a time in an attempt to bring the review of the implementation of the Belfast Agreement to a more intensive phase.
In a statement yesterday, the former chairman of the Northern peace talks, who has returned to facilitate the review, said that after his two initial rounds of meetings with the parties individually he was confident the impasse over the formation of an executive and decommissioning could be resolved.
"The meetings this week and last have enabled each of the parties to provide me with its assessment of the current situation. It is now appropriate to move to the next and more intensive phase of the review," said Senator Mitchell, who has returned to the US and is expected back in Belfast on Monday.
During the next phase of negotiations Senator Mitchell will conduct meetings with the individual parties in addition to a roundtable format of two or more parties in an attempt to break the deadlock.
"In those meetings, we will try to determine how best to accomplish the objectives for this review as established by the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach. The discussions already held reinforce my belief that it can be done."
Mr Cecil Walker, one of the few remaining Ulster Unionist MPs in support of the Belfast Agreement, said yesterday he believed the review could reach a successful outcome and reiterated his party's willingness to "jump together" with Sinn Fein over the arms issue.
"The Mitchell review can work. Progress can be made. The Assembly is ready to go live, but the decommissioning issue cannot go unresolved," said Mr Walker.
Claims by Sinn Fein that the UUP was employing a stalling strategy to avoid power-sharing were "deeply offensive and quite simply wrong," added the MP.
Meanwhile, the deputy leader of the UUP, Mr John Taylor, who effectively defected to the anti-agreement wing of his party 10 days ago, has called on "law-abiding" people to turn out in their thousands to a rally in Belfast tomorrow in support of the RUC. He described the Patten report as "a recipe for a real terrorist crisis in Northern Ireland".