The Government was "pushing an open door" on demilitarisation with the Northern Ireland Office, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern told the Association of European Journalists in Dublin yesterday.
British Army security towers on the Border were coming down and it was clear from meeting Northern Secretary Peter Hain that, by August 2007, he and his officials wished the North to have "what would be regarded as normal levels of troop numbers".
The reports published this week showed there was "a changed landscape in Northern Ireland both from a political but also from a practical point of view".
The Minister added that, in Border areas, "ordinary people are now crying out for ordinary policing".
The Government knew, before the release of the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) report, that the media would focus on the "negative aspects". As for the parallel report of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), he conceded that the North's security services were not unanimous in their assessment of the situation but, in the South, the Garda Síochána had confirmed there was no evidence that the IRA had failed to meet its commitments on full decommissioning.
The Government would take "very seriously" allegations in the IMC report on continuing criminality and intelligence-gathering by IRA members.
Meanwhile, loyalist paramilitarism was, perhaps, "a more difficult nut to crack" than dealing with the Provisionals. But the Government probably had better contacts than ever before among those loyalists who wanted to move away from criminality.
On the multi-party talks, which "hopefully" would take place on Monday at Hillsborough, he said it was time to restore "the primacy of politics" to the North. "We could all sit back and do nothing, but in our view that is not an option," he said.
It was up to individual political parties to convince the others of the merit of their proposals for achieving devolved government, which had to be "under the umbrella of the principles of the Good Friday agreement".
The North-South bodies were operating on a "care and maintenance" basis at present. "We'll need to build more and more on the North-South co-operation that was part of the reasoning why people in the South voted to delete Articles Two and Three (of the Constitution)."
In the talks, the Government would say clearly to the Democratic Unionist Party, for example: "If you believe there is merit in your documents, why don't you discuss them with parties like Sinn Féin?" Otherwise, direct rule would continue and there would be "more and intensified joint inter-governmentalism".
Responding to questions afterwards, Mr Ahern said DUP leader Dr Ian Paisley was "pivotal" in the process. "Our discussions with him have been very good and he has a good relationship with us and with the Taoiseach."