The Conservatives were defeated in the House of Commons last night in their attempt to restrict to one year the time period of legal immunity for decommissioning in Northern Ireland.
A Conservative amendment to the Northern Ireland Arms Decommissioning (Amendment) Bill - which had the support of the Ulster Unionists - seeking to limit the amnesty for one further year was defeated by 374 votes to 144.
The Bill, which was going through its final stages in the Commons, seeks to extend the current immunity, which runs out on February 27th, by 12 months, with the provision for further 12-month extensions for up to five years, subject to parliamentary approval.
Moving the Tory amendment, the shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Quentin Davies, bitterly accused the British Government of moving away from the traditional position of bipartisanship on Northern Ireland by proposing legislation that sent a message to the IRA that decommissioning deadlines were unimportant.
Extending the deadline for decommissioning by another five years when, under the terms of the Belfast Agreement the process should have been completed by July 2000, was, Mr Davies said, evidence of the Government's "policy of appeasement" of the IRA and Sinn Féin.
Shorter deadlines tended to "concentrate people's minds" better than longer ones, and Mr Davies stressed that the effect of the Bill would be to further delay the completion of decommissioning and the full implementation of the Belfast Agreement. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin and the IRA would extract more and more concessions from the government. The Conservatives and Ulster Unionists also demanded that the government should link normalisation procedures in Northern Ireland with a decommissioning programme.
Ulster Unionist MP Mr David Burnside said he was "totally disillusioned" with the decommissioning process and the word deadline should be banned from Northern Ireland's political vocabulary. Deadlines, he said, were meaningless and the message the government was sending to IRA paramilitaries was simply "appeasement, appeasement, appeasement".
However, rejecting criticism of the Bill, the Northern Ireland Security Minister, Ms Jane Kennedy, stressed the legislation only extended the immunity for one year, with the provision for further extensions. To suggest there was some kind of fixed five-year deadline was "profoundly wrong".
There had been a "credible start" to decommissioning and political pressure to complete the process must be maintained.