Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has expressed his satisfaction that the IRA throughout Ireland is seriously considering Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’s call on the paramilitary organisation fully to embrace peace and democracy.
Mr Ahern said he was "happy" the IRA was engaging in a detailed internal consultation programme about Mr Adams’s appeal. This confirms the IRA statement of late April that it would initiate such a debate.
The Taoiseach made his comments in Warsaw yesterday as efforts to rebuild the damaged peace process crank into operation again involving the main political protagonists in Belfast, Dublin, London and Washington.
Sinn Féin and DUP delegations, led respectively by Mr Adams and Ian Paisley, meet the re-elected British prime minister Tony Blair separately in London tomorrow, while this evening in Dublin the Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern meets the new Northern Secretary Peter Hain for a working dinner.
Today president George Bush’s Irish peace process envoy Mitchell Reiss meets Northern party leaders in Belfast before travelling to Dublin for a meeting with Minister for Foreign Affairs tomorrow afternoon.
Dr Reiss also separately met Mr Hain and the DUP Westminster parliamentary team led by Dr Paisley in London yesterday.
On the margins of a Council of Europe summit in Warsaw yesterday, the Taoiseach said he now knew the promised IRA debate was under way. "This is significant. It will take time. I’m not going to put a time limit on it.
I’m happy that it’s under way. I know now that it’s under way," he said. In April Mr Adams said a positive IRA response would have "enormous significance and impact". Mr Ahern said he was not putting a timescale on when the IRA should respond but added it was vital the IRA meet the "ground rules" of decommissioning and ending violence and criminality and that there would be an end to the IRA "in its present form".
"It is only on those ground rules that we can move to peace and confidence," he added. Mr Ahern indicated he would have no difficulty with the IRA continuing in a "commemorative" guise as long as it met the main conditions of disarming and ending all activity.
Despite the IRA debate and the flurry of political activity, Mr Ahern indicated this renewed attempt to re-establish devolution in Northern Ireland will be a slow, fraught, deliberate process.
"This is a detailed [IRA] consultation process," he said. "We’re talking about all involved in the Provisional movement throughout the whole island, so that’s a detailed process. It’s not a question that it’s finished in days that is important to me. It’s the hope that we get the right results which allow us then to take up the political project."
Dr Reiss, after meeting Mr Hain, pledged that with the support of President Bush he would do all he could to help revive the peace process. "The goal is, as it has always been, to try and bring peace to the people of Northern Ireland who for so long have wanted it so very much."
In the House of Commons yesterday, Dr Paisley said "another road" must be travelled by the British government in the peace process.
Sitting in former UUP leader David Trimble’s seat, he said: "We have to go another road and that road must be that no terrorist, whether they come from one side or the other, can be in any government of any part of this United Kingdom."
The new Sinn Féin MP for Newry and Armagh, Conor Murphy, in London yesterday called for progress on "equality, human rights, collusion, the Irish language, demilitarisation, justice and policing".
The SDLP deputy leader Alasdair McDonnell said the British and Irish governments must hold to the Belfast Agreement.