JOHN MAJOR and Albert Reynolds will seek to intensify the pressure on Sinn Fein to accept the Downing Street declaration tomorrow morning at a meeting in London.

SINN Fein's Northern Ireland chairman, Mitchell McLaughlin, reiterated a plea to the Government by the SDLP leader, John Hume, to break deadlock over the Northern Ireland peace declaration.

JOHN MAJOR precipitated a new round of acrimonious public diplomacy from Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, yesterday by making it clear that there could be no question of 'renegotiation' of the joint Anglo-Irish declaration.

FRESH hopes of peace in Northern Ireland were raised last night when a more conciliatory approach to Sinn Fein's demands for clarification of the Downing Street declaration was signalled by Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

A SINN FEIN spokesman travelled to Westminster yesterday to release documents designed to show that republicans had been in secret contact with the British for three years, writes David McKittrick.

LOGS blaze merrily in the fire. Above a wooden table, seating 20 people, hangs an elaborately carved hunting scene. Traditional folk art, it seems - until you notice the factory chimneys in one corner of the picture. Then you realise: the wood-carving is yet another hymn to the now-deceased workers' and peasants' state, the German Democratic Republic. For this house, hidden in the woods near the border with Poland, was once reserved for the Stasi, the east German secret police, to relax in.

Sinn Fein has outlined a formal structure of public and private deliberation to underpin its response to the Downing Street declaration.

THE Labour Party's Northern Ireland spokesman, Kevin McNamara, yesterday added his voice to mounting calls for the Government to respond to Sinn Fein calls for clarification of the Downing Street declaration.

Shots were fired at the west Belfast home of Alex Maskey, a Sinn Fein councillor, last night. No one was injured. The loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters said they had carried out the shooting, their first of 1994.

IN ALL the reporting on the London/Dublin agreement, one angle has been absent: the restrictions on broadcast interviews with representatives of Sinn Fein, the UDA and nine other Northern Ireland organisations. But both the British broadcasting ban and its equivalent in the Republic of Ireland, Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, will become even more untenable if these organisations enter the political mainstream. The Government, which has taken pains to demonise Sinn Fein in particular, now has to render it 'constitutional'.

DOUGLAS HURD, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that the offer to the IRA and Sinn Fein to enter talks with the Government would remain on the table despite renewed violence in Ulster.

SINN FEIN yesterday added to the Government's credibility problem in Northern Ireland by releasing a sheaf of documents which it said were messages passed to it by the Government earlier this year.

MARTIN McGUINNESS, the Sinn Fein leader approached by the Government, said yesterday that contacts were continuing 'on a daily basis'.

WITH its usual sense of irony, the IRA's political counterpart, Sinn Fein, had chosen the South Place Ethical Society's base at London's Conway Hall to talk of its policies on Northern Ireland before a largely British press.