I believe the Taoiseach should lead a national discussion on the implications of the peace proposals he and Tony Blair promulgated last week. It is vital that unionists be persuaded to accept their places on the executive. Without them there is no Good Friday agreement, just as, without Sinn Fein, this is no agreement.

Nobody will gain if unionists or Sinn Fein are pushed into a corner and forced to say No.

To unionists, I would say that the best way to achieve IRA decommissioning, and a permanent end to the IRA campaign, is through the proposals made last week.

The failsafe mechanisms, if operated with integrity and set out in firm legal form, leave no doubt that actual decommissioning must happen if Sinn Fein is to stay in government. Only by entering the executive will unionists achieve the long-sought changes in Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution.

To get unionists to accept the proposals, it is important that other parties demonstrate that they have fully thought out the implications of commitments they gave last week. This demonstration will give confidence to others that they can, and will, fulfil their commitments.

If there is any lack of clarity there is space for distrust to grow.

There are two deficiencies in the outcome of last week's negotiations which can, and should, be remedied in the interests of the peace process.

There is something the Government can do and something the republican movement can do.

First, the Government.

Last week the Government agreed to allow failsafe mechanisms to be operated as early as the end of this month, which would abort the Good Friday agreement if decommissioning had not begun. Unfortunately, it had not taken the trouble to get prior legal authority from the Oireachtas for these mechanisms, and it has not so far publicly recognised that such legal authority is necessary.

This lack of attention to detail creates an unnecessary and unjustifiable doubt about the Government's commitment to the failsafe mechanisms. This doubt can be remedied by the immediate passage through the Dail and Seanad of legislation to give legal authority to the mechanisms.

Second, the republican movement.

It would be helpful if the republican movement showed that it has also thought out the full implications of commitments which Sinn Fein gave last week.

The Taoiseach was right to look for a statement from the IRA to back up Sinn Fein's statement that it "could" persuade the IRA to agree to decommissioning if other aspects of the Good Friday agreement were being implemented.

It has been rightly said that decommissioned weapons can be replaced, so the fundamental question is one of long-term political and military intentions. Republican long-term intentions need to be fully outlined.

The core issue is not one of timing, of sequencing, of failsafe mechanisms or even of trust.

The issue is one of interpretation of ideology - of the republican ideology of national self-determination and of how that ideology deals with the agreement. National self-determination was the key issue in the original Hume-Adams dialogue.

Although many of us asked the IRA to do so at the time, it was understandable that it did not say that its ceasefire was permanent in 1994. Sinn Fein had not been admitted to negotiations then and no agreement had been reached. National self-determination had not been achieved in republican terms.

In 1995, to get around the permanence issue, a gesture of IRA decommissioning was demanded by Sir Patrick Mayhew in Washington Three as a precondition to the admission of Sinn Fein to negotiations.

Washington Three was intended by the British as a compromise to get off the "permanence" hook. The IRA did not accept Washington Three and it was dropped. Again, the IRA could argue that national self-determination had not been achieved and there was no basis to start decommissioning.

Its position had an internal logic. This logic breaks down when it comes to the Good Friday agreement.

The agreement was negotiated with Sinn Fein participation. Yet when it was published last spring, the IRA did not endorse it. More critically, Sinn Fein has not accepted that the all-Ireland referendum on the agreement was a valid act of national self-determination.

In my opinion, this refusal to accept that national self-determination has been achieved is at the core of the problem.

It was as a consequence of that that Mr Gerry Adams said last autumn that the IRA war "must" be over, but neither he nor the IRA could say that it actually "is" over. Republicans could not say that it is over because they have not yet accepted the Good Friday agreement as a valid act of national self-determination.

This omission leaves the IRA with a continuing theoretical requirement to be ready for a resumption of armed struggle even though the agreement may have been implemented in full by everybody else.

Republicans must now change this interpretation of national self-determination. There is never a right or an easy time for such a fundamental rethink, but I believe most Irish people would feel that the time has come for republicans to accept that the 32-county referendum on the Good Friday agreement fulfilled all the requirements of the republican tradition and that the war can, therefore, be said to be over for good.

John Bruton TD is leader of Fine Gael