Taoiseach admits deadline for establishing North-South bodies is unlikely to be met

The Taoiseach has admitted publicly for the first time that the October 31st deadline for the establishment of North-South bodies will not be met.

"It is not the end of the world," Mr Ahern said yesterday, but the challenge now was to create a new process through which dialogue between the parties could be taken forward.

But, also speaking on the fringes of the EU summit here, the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, said he had "not given up on the 31st October deadline at all".

The two leaders met for some 25 minutes on Saturday on the margins of the summit for what spokesmen on both sides described as largely a mutual briefing on the state of the peace process.

"There is a difficulty at the moment," Mr Blair told journalists yesterday, "and we have to be very creative and flexible about how to overcome the problem that we have. I very much want to see progress on the North-South bodies."

Mr Ahern acknowledged, however, that "we're not going to see any decommissioning in the short term, but will have to keep on pressing to get there".

As a consequence "we're not going to see a shadow executive formed". The challenge now was to work on ensuring "that the executive is there in real form in February and to see what mechanisms we can put in place now".

The shadow executive's role had been intended to help the process of putting in place the North-South implementing bodies provided for in the agreement, he said.

"We have to find some other way of keeping that going. The two governments and the parties are doing that to an extent. The SDLP are working with the UUP. We are working with the parties. We'll be talking to Sinn Fein, the SDLP . . .

"We have to try and find some way to formalise that if there's no shadow executive. A lot of work has been done on the implementation bodies. The work is ongoing and we have to find some way of feeding that into some system and have to do that fairly quickly."

Asked if the Government was exploring the possibility of bringing forward the setting up of the full executive from February, Mr Ahern said that was an option only if real progress was made on decommissioning "and there is no signal to that effect".

Mr Ahern said he was not aware in detail of Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien's proposals, but that, insofar as he understood it, "the idea is for constitutional nationalists talking and trying to work together, and I look forward to the UKUP doing that within the context of the North-South ministerial bodies and the implementation bodies over the next number of months. We're nearly at that stage, so I hope they'll join wholeheartedly in it."