No 'quick fix' to arms impasse

The deputy leader of the nationalist Social and Democratic Labour Party has warned there is no "quick fix" to the arms issue blocking the Northern Ireland peace process.

Speaking on BBC's Breakfast with Frost, Seamus Mallon said the best way forward was to remove the "political kudos" from the people that hold arms.

The former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland's short-lived power sharing executive called on all the pro-agreement parties and the British and Irish governments to sit down and take an "honest look" at what caused the current failure.

"I think we should look at the section on decommissioning in the Good Friday Agreement and ask ourselves, `Is it adequate to deal with the problem'," he said.

"Is it right that what is essentially a security problem is sitting right in the middle of a political process?

"While it is not being resolved it is damaging and poisoning the political process in a very substantial way."

'Faulty judgement'

He said he was not advocating a re-draft of the Agreement but a recognition that that section of it may not achieve what it was meant to achieve.

Sinn Fein and the IRA were part of one republican movement, according to Mr Mallon. But he said there were those within it who wanted to decommission and those who did not.

The difficulty in a democratic situation was that "those who hold the arms hold the cards".

He said: "What we have got to do is to take away the political cards, the political kudos, of holding arms from those who have got that stuff".

Mr Mallon said Ulster Secretary Peter Mandelson had made a "faulty judgment" and a "hasty decision" when he suspended the 10-week old power-sharing Executive last month.