Editorial Searching for an answer

There is no doubt about the determination on the part of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, to get it "sorted," as Blair put it yesterday.

"It" being the now-tightly tied knot of the issues still bedeviling hopes for peace in Northern Ireland: decommissioning, demilitarization and police reform. By moving the talks to Weston Hall, a quiet country villa near Birmingham, and imposing a five-mile "no spin" zone, free from the media, Blair displayed an impressive willpower to untie that knot by Wednesday. But will a change of scenery, determination and a spin-free environment be enough to undo the damage done by tying those contentious issues together in the first place?

Initial indications are that they will not be enough.

With hours to go before the deadline, the taoiseach, caught on a quick trip back to Dublin for a court case, was reporting "no progress" being made. His gloomy comment came even as the Ulster Freedom Fighters (the cover name for the Ulster Defense Association) was announcing that it had withdrawn its support for the Good Friday agreement. In a statement that was full of bitterness, it said that: "This has to stop, we cannot allow this to go any further. There can be no more concessions to nationalism while the fabric of our loyalist community is torn asunder."

Davy Ervine, for the Progressive Unionist Party, which is linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force, followed with a declaration that the PUP was pulling out of the "current phase" of the peace process. Among loyalists, Ervine had always been the most positive and upbeat about the process.

Regardless of what weight may be placed on the outbursts of fringe loyalist groups, who have little support within the wider community, they do give a strong sense of the growing alienation from the peace process felt by Northern Ireland’s Protestants.

This is real. At street level, it expresses itself in brutal violence against ordinary, vulnerable Catholics, one of whom was murdered last week on his way to work. But at a political level, it is something of which David Trimble and his colleagues in the Ulster Unionist Party will have to take cognizance. One thing is certain — it will make it much harder for them to meet any further demands from the other parties to the negotiations for flexibility on such issues as further police reforms, as is being demanded by Sinn Fein.

The omens are bad. Still, the IRA has the power to change all this with a move on arms decommissioning. The British have the power to change the scenario with a courageous gesture of demilitarization. Unfortunately, even if the IRA did, say, concrete over an arms dump or two, it would probably not satisfy the hawks in the UUP — men like Jeffrey Donaldson and David Burnside, who have effectively become Trimble’s minders.

Observers are saying that Blair will not take no for an answer. The question is, how will he make the others say yes to the kind of concessions that are needed if the Good Friday agreement and the devolved government in Northern Ireland are going to survive?

That is a question to which there is, at the moment, no obvious answers — unless it lies hidden among the shrubbery of Weston Hall’s lovely parklands.