Ulster's peace bid left on the brink again

STALEMATE WAS snatched from the jaws of victory in the Northern Ireland peace process yesterday as a chance of making significant progress unravelled at the last moment.

Although all the signs are that agreement on the issues of new government departments and cross-border bodies will eventually be reached, serious slippage now seems inevitable in the timetable envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement.

The difficulty emerged in the late afternoon when First Minister David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party announced that much more work was needed and this was unlikely to be concluded before the middle of this month.

This declaration dashed the hopes of Tony Blair and most of the other Northern Ireland parties that an agreement could be wrapped up by last night. Mr Blair had earlier spent seven hours in talks with the Stormont parties, which went on until 2am yesterday.

Until lunchtime yesterday the prevailing view at Stormont was that only details remained to worked out before agreement was reached on the new administration's departmental structures and on new institutions to link north and south.

But in the afternoon Mr Trimble's party deputy, John Taylor, emerged after a meeting of Unionist Assembly members to dispel hopes that a resolution was imminent. He said: "I do not expect any conclusion tonight nor tomorrow and possibly well into next week. I think we should all relax. It's going very nicely."

He added that, with Mr Trimble scheduled to fly to Washington today, there was little chance of having things finalised until his return on 14 December. A meeting of the Assembly is possible on that date, Mr Taylor said, but "it then will require a few weeks for Assembly members to have time to study the papers that are finally agreed". The sudden change of mood and timetable raised suspicions of Ulster Unionist backbenchers unhappy with the emerging deal.

The Assembly is due to receive devolved powers in February, but this will require the passage of primary legislation through Westminster. The legislative process cannot start, however, until the shape of the new arrangements has been settled by the parties.

The Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, said: "There has been some measure of progress reached and now some people are in denial and seeking to move backwards. There is a moral and political responsibility on David Trimble as First Minister to conclude on all of these matters before he leaves."

Even before Mr Taylor's intervention, the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party had denounced the emerging new arrangements as a cave-in and a retreat, adding: "Most Unionists will find this utterly undemocratic, totally unfair and completely unacceptable."