The Electronic Telegraph 25 April 1995 FRONT PAGE

The Agenda

Whether or not any commitments have been given in advance, ministers will want the dialogue to be seen as a serious attempt to secure the IRA's agreement to make at least a gesture on decommissioning.

Ministers have said that a surrender of explosives would be required in the first instance as a sign of republican good faith. They also stress that bringing Sinn Fein into the wider political process will be impossible unless progress is made on disarmament.

If agreement can be achieved on decommissioning, the talks will also need to consider how this can be verified. There have been suggestions that a third party, possibly the United Nations, the Canadians or a Scandinavian country would oversee the destruction of explosives and weapons.

Sinn Fein will focus on policing, firearms legally held by the police and Army, and security.

The republicans will also want to talk about the future of paramilitary prisoners. Exploratory discussions between Northern Ireland Office civil servants and Sinn Fein never got round to the subject. The meeting at which it was to be addressed was called off when the republicans claimed their room at Stormont was being bugged.

But despite the Government's insistence that there are no political prisoners and an amnesty is out of the question, the issue is important to both sets of paramilitaries.

There has been talk of a more flexible system of parole and early release to allow all but the most notorious terrorists guilty of the worst crimes to end their prison terms early.

Sinn Fein deal ends the long deadlock

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