Deadlock as IRA pulls Northern Ireland disarmament offer

BELFAST - The Irish Republican Army (IRA) warned British and Irish governments on Thursday they should take seriously its decision to withdraw an offer to scrap its weapons -- a move that has dealt a blow to the peace process.

The outlawed guerrilla group again hurt hopes of securing a lasting political settlement between Northern Ireland's feuding communities when it said it was withdrawing a conditional offer to put its weapons beyond use.

Government officials and police chiefs said they did not believe the outlawed guerrilla group was preparing to plunge the British province back into the violence that plagued it for 30 years. But the IRA said they should take the move seriously.

"The two governments are trying to play down the importance of our statement," the IRA said in a second statement received by several media organisations, including Reuters, late on Thursday. "Do not underestimate the seriousness of the situation," it added in the two-line statement.

It did not explicitly threaten to end its 1997 ceasefire.

The group's angry words underline the bleak outlook for Anglo-Irish efforts to return the running of Northern Ireland to its divided Protestant and Catholic communities.

"We know they have the capability, we know they have the capacity, (but) we do not think they intend to return to what they would call the war," Chief Constable Hugh Orde told reporters in Belfast before the second IRA statement was made.

British and Irish leaders accuse the guerrilla group of blocking political progress after it was widely blamed for a massive Belfast bank heist.

In December, the IRA, which killed around 1800 people during a three-decade campaign against British rule, offered to disarm as part of a wider deal to revive a provincial parliament in which Protestant and Catholic parties shared power.

That assembly, set up as part of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, which largely ended the violence, collapsed more than two years ago amid recriminations over alleged IRA activity.

Negotiations to revive it failed because Protestant unionists, so called because they back the union with Britain, said IRA disarmament must be accompanied by photographic proof -- a demand rejected by the IRA as an unacceptable humiliation.

Hopes of completing the deal have since been dashed by police allegations -- supported by London and Dublin but denied by the IRA -- that the republican group carried out December's £26.5 million ($70.89 million) bank robbery in Belfast.

"We do not intend to remain quiescent within this unacceptable and unstable situation," the IRA said in Wednesday's statement. "It has tried our patience to the limit. Consequently ... we are taking all our proposals off the table."

The IRA -- which draws its support from Northern Ireland's Catholic minority -- has indicated its displeasure with events in a similar manner during previous crises in the peace process.

Political analysts were already predicting little movement on reviving the assembly before May's expected British election, which will be rancorously contested in the province. Now many are predicting a longer political freeze.

"The prospect... is that the stalemate will continue indefinitely," said an editorial in Thursday's Belfast Telegraph.

- REUTERS