The Northern Secretary, Mr Peter Mandelson, should bypass Sinn Fein and negotiate directly with the IRA if the current review negotiations between the parties fail, according to an Ulster Unionist Party adviser.
Mr Alex Kane, an aide to the UUP Assembly member, Dr Esmond Birnie, was putting forward Dr Birnie's plan for saving the Belfast Agreement and his view that leading republicans have been hinting at changes of strategy within the IRA in recent weeks.
Speaking in a personal capacity at the inaugural meeting of the Northern Ireland Political History Society in Belfast last night, Mr Kane suggested that the British government use established "channels of communication" to contact the paramilitary groups directly if the Mitchell review fails to break the impasse over decommissioning and the formation of an executive.
Mr Kane said a strategy of "shadow and substance" should be adopted as the May 2000 deadline for total disarmament approaches.
The deputy leader of the SDLP, Mr Seamus Mallon, should return as the North's deputy first minister, he said, the Assembly should reconvene to debate day-to-day policy decisions, and parties to which ministerial positions were to be allocated should produce policy programmes for government.
He said that for an inclusive executive to be established, the UUP needed a public guarantee that the war was over, "and we need an immediate down payment in the form of the first delivery of their weapons of war.
"A stable, firm and democratic government for Northern Ireland remains our ultimate goal, but we will not build it upon a hill of Semtex and rocket launchers."
Mr Kane stressed that it was not the Ulster Unionist Party, but the IRA, which was preventing Sinn Fein from entering an executive. However, he said there were "clear signs that the IRA now acknowledge that they are losing the political and moral argument on decommissioning."
The Belfast Agreement represented an "honourable and historic" accord and a risk on the part of the UUP leader, Mr David Trimble, and the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams. But the IRA had taken no risks.
"If the IRA are not prepared to take a risk with their own people, then why should they expect David Trimble to take another risk that the IRA would decommission if he set up the executive tomorrow?" asked Mr Kane.