The British government's March deadline for the start of the transfer of legislative powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly could be missed, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Dr Mowlam, admitted yesterday.
Speaking on BBC's Breakfast with Frost, Dr Mowlam said March 10th was both a deadline and a target but in the past it had been the momentum of the parties to the Belfast Agreement that had secured progress, not deadlines. The government did not want the deadline to run into the marching season or the European elections but, recalling the missed deadline for the Belfast Agreement last year, Dr Mowlam said: "We may well miss this. I'm aiming for it, the parties are aiming for it, but nothing is written in stone . . ."
A Downing Street spokesman said the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, was not planning to visit Northern Ireland ahead of the March 10th deadline, but added: "It's not impossible."
Urging Sinn Fein to "build the confidence" to show it was serious about decommissioning, and the unionists not to "hold up pre-conditions" to Sinn Fein's participation in the executive, Dr Mowlam said the momentum of the past year must be maintained. The process was not unravelling but it was not going to be easy either.
Ruling out the prospect of ending early prisoner releases solely on the basis of so-called punishment beatings, Dr Mowlam said any decision would be based on advice from the security forces and evidence that paramilitaries were not seriously on ceasefire. Dr Mowlam continued: "My problem is they're barbaric, they're obscene and I'd like to see them stop tomorrow. People say to me OK, stop prisoner releases and the punishment beatings will stop. The difficulty with that is many of the punishment beatings, not all, but many are carried out by people that aren't on ceasefire, that don't want to see the process work, so to stop prisoner releases would achieve very little."
However, that analysis was criticised by the First Minister-designate, Mr David Trimble, who said Dr Mowlam had adopted a "very strained and somewhat artificial" definition of ceasefires. Mr Trimble said that excluding beatings and shootings from the definition of a ceasefire was not acceptable to most people and that Dr Mowlam was proceeding on the basis that because there were no bombs the ceasefires were being maintained.