WORKMEN were adding two extra strands of barbed wire yesterday to the top of the mesh fence surrounding Castle Buildings in the grounds of Stormont, where the parties involved in peace negotiations will face each other across a plain conference room on Monday.
The delegates will be paid a daily rate of £100 sterling and their parties will receive a flat rate allowance of £300 a day, plus a research grant of up to £6,000 a quarter.
Last minute preparations were in full swing yesterday in the three storey modern building, which has already been in use during the past 18 months for bilateral talks between British ministers and officials and the Northern parties. Two men with damp cloths pains takingly cleaned each leaf of a large pot plant rows of new plastic wrapped seats lined the corridors window cleaners, electricians and carpenters bustled about and hasty repairs were being carried out on the lift.
The third floor conference room where the plenary session will convene is about 40 ft square. The delegates will sit around a continuous, varnished beech desk which forms an enormous square in the room. There are 12 identical padded office seats along each side of the square, facing in towards the centre of the room 48 seats in all.
Along the walls of the room there are more seats, where the research and back up staff will sit behind each delegation. Decorative plastic vegetation hangs from a narrow balcony and the walls are adorned with two simple electric clocks and a selection of fairly sombre black and white art works one of them a print of Diarmaid De Largy's Pieta.
No details of where the various party and government delegations will sit were released yesterday, and there was nothing to distinguish even the chairman's place.
In the corridors on the various floors there are individual party rooms. Door number B5.6 is labelled "Independent Chairman", another has the sign "Talks Administrator" and a third is intriguingly titled "Patch Room".
The Northern Secretary has written to nine of the 10 parties which had delegates returned in the recent election. He invited them to nominate their negotiating teams as soon as possible a maximum of three names a party, with a further three people who need not be elected and who will not have speaking rights.
Sinn Fein has not been issued with this invitation but has received a letter giving details of the forum, which is to hold its first meeting in a central Belfast office building next Friday.
A loss of earnings allowance at a daily rate of £100, or £50 for less than four hours, will be payable to elected delegates only, on the basis of their attendance for the purposes of the negotiations.
The invited parties are Alliance, the DUP, Labour, Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, the Progressive Unionist Party, the SDLP, the UK Unionist Party Robert McCartney, the Ulster Democratic Party and the Ulster Unionist Party.
The talks sessions will be conducted in private, with the media not only excluded from the building but kept outside the gates and the barbed wire fences.