IRA 'has started to decommission'

IRA members display their weapons

The IRA announces that it has put beyond use part of its arsenal of weapons, as agreed under the Northern Ireland peace process.

Only 24 hours earlier, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said he was asking the IRA for a ground-breaking move on decommissioning. Many of Northern Ireland's politicians, while noting the significance of the statement, still said they wanted to see action not words.

Reaction to the news was varied. Speaking from Washington, Sinn Fein's Martin McGuiness said the priority now was 'saving the Good Friday Agreement, saving the peace process and saving the political institutions' - a sentiment that was echoed by his colleague Alex Maskey in an interview on the programme.

The government and the Ulster Unionist party were waiting for confirmation of decommissioning from the international decommissioning body chairman, General John de Chastelain, before they gave a reaction.

But speaking for the anti-agreement Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley Junior dismissed the news, saying they had no proof that any arms had been destroyed.

In America, the Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the politicians who has consistently supported Gerry Adams's visa application to enter the United States, said he believed this was a day of hope and expectation.

Also on the programme, Home Secretary David Blunkett decided to choose the unusual setting of a Commons select committee to announce the most significant change in drug policy in years.

After an afternoon of fevered speculation around Westminster, Mr Blunkett announced to the home affairs select committee that he would advise that cannabis be reclassified as a "class C" drug, meaning that possession will no longer be an automatically arrestable offence.

The Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe told us that she did not want this announcement to become a 'dealers charter,' but long-standing campaigners for the legalisation of cannabis, such as the backbench Labour MP Paul Flynn, welcomed the announcement as a 'major step forward.'

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