Mr Tony Blair will meet Mr David Trimble again on Monday in a determined attempt to rescue the Stormont talks process. But the prospects of agreement on decommissioning paramilitary weapons receded yesterday when Mr Trimble told the British Prime Minister he could not enter substantive political negotiations on the terms proposed by London and Dublin.
The urgency of the situation was underlined in Dublin. The decommissioning issue will have to be "wrapped up, or fail, in the next two weeks", the Taoiseach warned yesterday. Mr Ahern said: "We are working to deadlines. The papers [on decommissioning] will have to be put for decision. That is the agreed programme that the chairman, Senator George Mitchell, is working to." The Secretary of State, Dr Mo Mowlam, has demanded agreement on the issue at a plenary session of the multi-party talks next Wednesday, to clear the way for negotiations on September 15th.
But it is understood Mr Trimble bluntly told Mr Blair his leadership of the Ulster Unionists would be destroyed if he agreed to Sinn Fein participation without a clear commitment that decommissioning would take place in parallel to the negotiation process.
While Mr Trimble maintained Mr Blair shared his objective on decommissioning, the Prime Minister in turn indicated he would have difficulty renegotiating the paper agreed with the Government and published on June 25th.
The crisis deepened as the British government published its "clarificatory" letter to Sinn Fein's Mr Martin McGuinness on the terms for republican involvement in the process following an unequivocal restoration of the IRA ceasefire.
The July 9th letter makes explicit that, having been admitted, Sinn Fein could not be expelled from the talks process because of failure to advance the decommissioning issue. Crucially, the letter states that, should negotiations fail despite their best efforts, the two governments "will continue to pursue rapid progress to an overall agreed settlement, acceptable to both unionists and nationalists."
Official sources yesterday confirmed that no definitive plan yet exists by which London and Dublin would seek to effect a settlement which did not result from agreement among the parties. But the question of contingency plans may well be raised at this morning's meeting of the Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Conference in London, chaired jointly by Dr Mowlam and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Burke.
Speaking after his meeting with the Prime Minister yesterday, Mr Trimble said: "I made it clear that we cannot accept this document as it presently stands" and called for amendment to reflect what he claimed was their shared intention "that there should be actual decommissioning during talks." Mr Trimble continued: "Now this document is not clear about that, and we are merely saying to the Prime Minister: let's have your intention - which is our intention - clearly written in. Thus, there would be no wriggling out."