The institutions of the Belfast Agreement are again facing collapse after the Ulster Unionist Party, with the surprising support of the Progressive Unionist Party, succeeded in tabling an Assembly exclusion motion against Sinn FΘin.
Without a substantive move from the IRA on arms by Monday next all five UUP and DUP ministers are pledged to withdraw from the Executive, rendering this key plank of devolution unworkable.
While the IRA is under considerable Irish, British and international pressure on arms the Sinn FΘin MLA, Mr Gerry Kelly, yesterday warned that such motions were counter-productive in terms of convincing the IRA it should start putting weapons beyond use.
"The difficulty is that any time the IRA have moved, and they have moved on a number of occasions, that what the Ulster Unionists and others have done is pocket (these moves) or completely dismissed (them).
"They have diminished anything the IRA was prepared to do," Mr Kelly said. "The action of David Trimble does not help the issue of decommissioning," he added.
The DUP - with the support of hardline Ulster Unionist MLA, Ms Pauline Armitage - had already succeeded in gaining the 30 signatories necessary to table an expulsion motion against Sinn FΘin's two Executive ministers, Mr Martin McGuinness and Ms Bairbre de Br·n.
Mr Trimble, who was attempting to lodge a similar motion, was two signatories short of the necessary 30 names. Yesterday, Mr David Ervine and Mr Billy Hutchinson of the PUP - which is linked to the UVF, which is also yet to decommission - came to the aid of Mr Trimble by supporting the UUP motion.
The result is that there will be similar UUP and DUP motions on Monday's Assembly order paper but the Ulster Unionist proposal will have precedence, with Mr Trimble allowed to open and close the debate.
The motion is virtually certain to fail because it will not command cross-community party support, as required under the Belfast Agreement. In Brighton, the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, said: "There will be no unification of Ireland except by consent - and there will be no return to the days of unionist or Protestant supremacy because those days have no place in the modern world. So the unionists must accept justice and equality for nationalists."
Speaking in Dublin before he met the Taoiseach last evening, the UUP leader, Mr Trimble, said he expected direct rule to be reimposed in Northern Ireland next week.
Mr Trimble said there was "still time" for the IRA to take decisive action on decommissioning but he did not place much hope on recent promises of an "intensification" of IRA contact with the decommissioning body made after the attacks in the US.
He rejected suggestions that the unionists were motivated by a desire not to share power with Sinn FΘin and insisted "if we were using no decommissioning as an excuse not to share power then we wouldn't even have started it".
What had stiffened unionists resolve to have Sinn FΘin expelled or to withdraw its ministers was the "crystalising moment" when they "saw Sinn FΘin still involved in some pretty nasty things through the IRA such as FARC in Columbia," he maintained.
