It is time for Ahern and Blair to act to save the very morality of constitutional politics, David Trimble tells Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor
"The Taoiseach is the leader of the Irish nation and he should, therefore, be giving leadership to all those who regard themselves as Irish nationalists. There is a desperate need, not just for political leadership, but for moral leadership as well.
"We are standing here only a couple of hundred yards from Magennis's bar where Mr McCartney was done to death a few weeks ago. If that sort of situation doesn't call for a leadership that does more than comment, a leadership which acts, what could?"
Speaking privately after an understated centenary meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council, David Trimble insists quietly: "We can't have a moral vacuum at the heart of the process. Governments ought to be the guardian of the process, they ought to be the guardian of the legal and moral integrity of the process. I know what they've said in terms of condemnation - I'm saying I think it needs to go further than that."
So there you have it prime minister, there you have it Taoiseach. The appeal could not be clearer and the language could not be simpler from the unionist who sees himself as having done more than any other to secure the Belfast Agreement.
Republicans, he believes, have failed to deliver on the most basic of democratic criteria and are therefore excluding themselves. Other democrats should not have to continue to pay the penalty for Sinn Féin failures and IRA refusals to go away. The British and Irish governments, by keeping a toe in the constitutional door, are ignoring the "moral vacuum at the heart of the process".
With two months before the most important - and as yet undeclared - Westminster election of recent times, the UUP has made it almost painfully clear what it sees at stake.
Trimble's future as an MP and as leader, the UUP's future as a major force for conciliation at the centre of Ulster politics - all these are vulnerable.
Ulster Unionists have gone heavy on the history this weekend.
Theirs is the party which has delivered "Ulster self-determination, the principle of consent, the abolition of Dublin's territorial claim in Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, the demolition of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the scrapping of the Maryfield Secretariat, the replacement of the secret and unaccountable Anglo-Irish process with the transparent and accountable North-South Ministerial Council, and bringing an end to decades of violence. These are all achievements that I am proud to say the Ulster Unionist Party negotiated," said Mr Trimble.
It is the DUP, as Mr Trimble's speech laboured, which "gulders" - a pejorative Ulsterism describing a position which is all bark and no bite. And it is the DUP that, gradually and dishonestly, has adopted a position broadly and belatedly supportive of the Belfast Agreement it so loudly deplores.
Trimble's accusations concerning the British and Irish governments already find nodding acceptance among some senior SDLP people.
But then they, too, are preparing to fight for their survival and for their share of the centre ground.