Pressure on Blair to save peace deal

Tony Blair today faced pressure to put the Northern Irish peace process back on track by removing the secrecy surrounding IRA disarmament.

Unionist leader David Trimble urged the Prime Minister to declare what he has been told, in confidence, about the kind and quantity of weapons destroyed by the Provisionals in their latest act of decommissioning.

The demand came as Mr Blair embarked on a round of telephone talks in an attempt to rescue an agreement between Unionists and republicans to restore the province's power sharing government.

Mr Trimble's aides were meeting Sinn Fein representatives in Belfast.

In the Commons, Ulster Secretary Paul Murphy was beginning the process of calling elections for the Stormont Assembly for 26 November, despite confusion over what would happen if no deal was in place by then. A breakthrough agreement looked a near certainty at times yesterday, with Mr Blair in Belfast to approve the package.

But a carefully choreographed sequence of events was knocked off course when Unionists objected to the lack of detail in a description, by independent arms commissioner General John de Chastelain, of the latest IRA decommissioning exercise.

Mr Blair last night called the act of decommissioning "substantial" and the secrecy surrounding it "faintly ludicrous". He said: "I believe that if people knew the information that we had been told then yes, they would be satisfied."

But Mr Trimble, under pressure from his own ranks to secure visible and credible disarmament by the IRA, told BBC Ulster: "Let the Prime Minister put the information he has in the public domain."

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams warned of "fairly profound difficulties" in the talks but said these could not easily be resolved by greater IRA openness. He said: "One person's act of transparent decommissioning is another person's humiliation."

Staging elections next month without a deal in place would risk giving advantage to Ian Paisley's hardline DUP, which would wreck the powersharing executive if it overtook Mr Trimble's forces to become the largest Unionist party.

But for Mr Blair to disclose details of IRA disarmament without the goahead from Sinn Fein would raise the political temperature in the province and could make a deal less likely. Elaborate rules surrounding the decommissioning-process state that it should be done in secret, with General de Chastelain witnessing it but releasing few details.

Mr Blair said it was important to overcome the secrecy "so that people know it wasn't just a few old First World War rifles and a rusty this'n'that."

But Irish Premier Bertie Ahern mocked the Unionist demand, joking: "I don't really care what's the brand name of the guns."

There was disagreement over whether Mr Trimble had been led by Sinn Fein to believe that General de Chastelain would be more forthcoming in his announcement yesterday. Mr Adams suggested that the Unionist leader was looking for a way out from a deal because he had simply "lost his nerve".