There's little point in proceeding with multi-party talks in the North if the IRA refuses to address the need for it to give up all paramilitary activity, the Ulster Unionist Party leader has said.
In a statement issued after a meeting in London with the British Prime Minister, Mr David Trimble said that Unionist patience had been "exhausted".
The Upper Bann MP, who was accompanied at the meeting by former Stormont ministers, Sir Reg Empey and Mr Michael McGimpsey and North Down MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon, said: "Our discussions served to underline the need to maintain pressure on republicans to undertake 'acts of completion'.
"We are not seeking great-sounding words or gestures, but finality.
"The Ulster Unionist Party, indeed, all the people of Northern Ireland, want to know that the Republican Movement have put up the shutters, have gone out of business, have ended their love affair with the gun."
While Mr Trimble insisted his party wanted the return of devolution and to see the power-sharing institutions restored, he insisted that, for that to happen, republicans would have to abandon "their bad old ways".
The former Northern Ireland First Minister continued: "If that isn't forthcoming, then the onus will be on the Prime Minister to do the decent thing.
"We encouraged him to have ready a range of sanctions, including exclusion, in response to any foot-dragging or failure by republicans."
Sinn Féin president Mr Gerry Adams said last night that the multi-party talks have made little progress. Mr Adams told a public meeting in Belfast his party was committed to the peace process.
Mr Adams said: "So far in our efforts to bring back the institutions there has been no substantive progress.
"And there will not be until the British and Irish governments come forward with time-framed programmatic implementation plans for those aspects of the Agreement which are their responsibility.
"While Sinn Féin believes that the institutions need to be reinstated as soon as possible, they should not have been suspended in the first place. Even if the institutions are not reinstated all other aspects of the Good Friday Agreement must be and will be fully implemented."
PA