It is time for political parties in Northern Ireland to go back to the drawing board following the failure of republicans to abandon criminality, Ulster Unionist Party leader, Mr David Trimble, said tonight.
Mr Trimble accused republicans of repeatedly shunning efforts to make them purely political. He also called for the removal from the talks agenda of any plans to transfer policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont.
Mr Trimble told colleagues in Portadown: "Now in the aftermath of the Northern Bank raid, taken together with all republicanism's failures over these years, we all have to face the reality that republicans have consistently failed to make an unequivocal choice in favour of the basic principles of the Belfast Agreement.
"They only offer more process, not completion and have repeatedly refused to reform themselves.
"For the [British] government to offer republicans yet another final chance is to make themselves an object of mirth ... Fudging the requirement of a commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means, as the DUP would do through their 'Corporate Assembly,' is totally unacceptable.
"Handing over the Northern Ireland Assembly Executive to a selection of the great and the good is a confession of failure which we are not prepared to make.
"Instead, we must draw a line under current experiments and go back to the basics of the Agreement and consider, with others, where we go from here."
Mr Trimble told party colleagues in Carleton Orange Hall that republicans had chosen criminality when faced with a choice between politics and criminality.
He said when Sinn Féin was discussing last year how policing and justice powers would be carved up with the DUP, their colleagues were planning the bank raid.
"There could not be clearer evidence that republicans were negotiating in bad faith," he said.
"Consequently the devolution of policing and justice matters must now be off the agenda."
PA