Unionist leader Mr David Trimble has called on the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries to state what they can deliver to ensure a peaceful Northern Ireland. The onus for breaking the current political deadlock rests with the paramilitaries, not unionists, he insisted last night.
The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader said there could be no private armies in a wholly democratic society and this principle was written into the Irish Constitution.
"If all the parties are truly committed to exclusively peaceful and democratic means it is not just that there would be no punishment beatings, no targeting and no attacks - there would be no private armies," he told the Construction Employers' Federation annual dinner in Temple patrick, Co Antrim.
"The onus therefore is not upon us to define our requirements. Rather, it is for those parties with a relationship with private armies to say what they are going to do to bring about the change that is required. I want to hear what proposals they have to deliver a peaceful society in Northern Ireland instead of what they want as preconditions for movement on the decommissioning issue," said Mr Trimble.
The UUP leader reasserted his commitment to the Belfast Agreement and accepted that the issue of decommissioning was not fully resolved in the agreement. "But the reality was that if we had tried to adopt such a legalistic approach there never would have been an agreement at all. The Belfast Agreement is a political document, not a legal construct, though it does have legal consequences," he said.
"Even though it did not cover everything precisely and left more problems to be sorted out during implementation, it was better to have achieved such an agreement, rather than no agreement at all."
Mr Trimble said the agreement settled a number of contentious issues such as ending the "long cold war" between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and creating the basis for a local administration that protected the vital interests of both sections of the community.
"There are still difficulties on contentious policing and justice matters, but the differences are being narrowed to symbolic matters which should be capable of being resolved in a balanced manner, instead of the unfair, anti-unionist whitewash in Patten," he added.
Former UUP minister Mr Sam Foster meanwhile said republicans were maintaining a strategy of continuing threat that "may appease the hawks in their own camp, but it makes it impossible for unionists to take them on trust". He accused the IRA of continuing to "recruit, train, target, intimidate, punish, purchase and stockpile".
Said Mr Foster: "The IRA blame us for insisting upon prior decommissioning and then they issue statements that they won't decommission at all. They blame us for reneging on promises and yet they are recruiting the next generation of teenage martyrs. They blame us for belligerence and then they take a baseball bat to some child who annoys a local godfather.
"What sort of crazy, convoluted, head-in-the-Semtex logic do these people actually live by? In the real world the breeze-block and democracy do not cohabit. The sooner the IRA understands that simple fact, then the sooner we will have the Good Friday agreement back in action."
A senior UUP adviser, Mr Alex Kane, accused anti-agreement unionists of failing to acknowledge the "reality" that they must do a deal with nationalists. "Unionists are going to have to face the fact that the emphasis on majority rule may soon be in the non-unionist bloc's favour."
"If we do not reach some sort of settlement with them under the existing agreement we may not be in a position to do so under another process."
Meanwhile, the former Sinn Fein Assembly member, Mr Gerry Kelly, said yesterday that the Northern Secretary Mr Mandelson, in his recent remarks praising the RUC, was "pandering" to unionism.
