According to the British Prime Minister and Irish Taoiseach the proposals package is complete.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern travelled to the Prime Minister’s constituency in Sedgefield, County Durham of Friday morning to put the final touches on the plan and announce the completion of their role in the current discussion process.

Mr Blair said: "We will put the proposals to the parties by the middle of next week and we will publish them on the same day and we ask the political parties in responding to them, to consider them carefully and not to engage in knee-jerk reactions to them."

Mr Ahern described the work as now complete and asked the parties to consider the proposals carefully and was hopeful that they would “go with them" as the two governments had given their “best effort” when drawing up the document.

While Bertie Ahern quipped about the Prime Minister’s safe constituency, the premiers declined to answer further questions, a clear indication that the underlying mood was tense.

The non-negotiable package of proposals -when finally handed down - will aim to create a rescue plan for the Northern Ireland peace process. However, they will be launched into the turbulent waters of the current political climate in the province.

On Thursday 26 July two hard-line Ulster Unionists MPs Jeffery Donaldson and David Burnside - in what appears to be a pre-emptive strike - declared that they would no longer support the “so-called peace process”. Several top UUP figures have consistently refused to be drawn on the position adopted by Jeffery Donaldson and David Burnside.

Meanwhile, Sir Reg Empey, who is acting First Minister, has hit out at the Irish Government’s failure to deal adequately with decommissioning:

The Minister said: “The root cause of the present political impasse is the repeated failure of Sinn Fein/IRA to honour its word on decommissioning. He said that the patience of the wider community had “run out.”

Granting of another raft of concessions to Republicans without a start to IRA decommissioning would mean that the British and Irish governments had lost all control of the process and the failure to hold Republicans to their promises on decommission was “equivalent to the Irish Government bending its knee to the IRA”.

He added that the people of this entire island had not voted for an ‘armed peace’, yet there had been “precious little evidence of the Irish Government doing anything to make this a reality.”

Former First Minister David Trimble, who resigned at the start of July due to no move towards IRA disarmament, remains out of the picture, but he was expected to return to the province on Friday after an engagement in North America.

(SP)