LEEDS CASTLE, England (AFP) - Crucial talks aimed at restoring home rule for Northern Ireland ended in failure, as Catholic parties and government sources blamed hardline Protestants for "choking" the deal.

But British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, his Irish counterpart, stressed that for the first time they saw a possible dissolution of the outlawed paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA).

"Subject to a satisfactory outcome to these consultations, we can finally and at long last resolve the issue of arms in the politics of Northern Ireland," Blair and Ahern said in a joint statement Saturday.

But despite three days of intensive negotiations, "there is however not yet comprehensive agreement" on the issues that are key to reviving the power-sharing government in the province, Blair told journalists at the close of the talks.

The prime ministers, joined by top diplomats and US envoy Mitchell Reiss, spent three days at Leeds Castle, a picturesque southeast England estate, trying to overcome the divisions that led to the suspension of the Northern Ireland government two years ago.

"We've basically resolved the contours of the paramilitary question," Blair said, calling it the "big issue" that had long dogged the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

By multiple accounts from inside Leeds Castle, the IRA was prepared to make a major concession offer on disarmament.

"I think that progress was made on a range of issues," Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA's political arm Sinn Fein, said. "My strong view is that the IRA is not the problem."

"If we had had a comprehensive agreement today, all of these things would have been made a thing of the past, but we did not get that," he said.

Leaders tried to put a positive spin on the summit, saying it had set out the remaining points of division, but most blamed the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for its ultimate failure with their demands to overhaul the Good Friday agreement.

Ian Paisley, the 78-year-old firebrand leader of the DUP, said the party needed more proof of any IRA commitment to disarm. "I am too old to be bluffed. We will believe it when we see it, and we're going no farther than that."

"How can any party come to negotiate and not negotiate, not make any contribution, not meet with other parties?" Adams retorted in his remarks to the press.

The DUP refuses to meet face-to-face with Sinn Fein, even though they are both the biggest parties in Northern Ireland and would have to sit together in any restored power-sharing government.

Demanding changes to the Northern Ireland government institutions "was the DUP mechanism for choking off any deal," said Alasdair McDonnell, number two at the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).

Even Irish government sources said Paisley's team did not budge from their positions, while a British government source said Blair had been furious at the party's intransigence.

However, David Trimble, former first minister and head of the minority Ulster Unionists (UUP), said the DUP, long opposed to the Good Friday pact, was "increasingly buying into it".

The DUP wants to see Northern Ireland's assembly vote by majority rule on all aspects of government -- a move that would break the cross-community system of checks and balances, and give the Protestant party a grip on ministerial posts.

"They want a veto over everything," said Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey.

But Ahern stressed that the "fundamentals of (power-sharing in) the Good Friday agreement are not up for debate."

The meeting, which began with a mood of guarded optimism under the sunny skies on Thursday, had to wind up beneath storm clouds at noon on Saturday to make way for a private wedding at Leeds Castle.

The venue was where Middle East diplomats paved the way for their historic Camp David peace pact 25 years ago.

Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen and Paul Murphy, Britain's minister for Northern Ireland, were to lead a fresh round of lower-level negotiations that kicks off, again, on Tuesday.

"I am confident that if we can all continue to work together in the coming days we can get the deal done," the US envoy Reiss said.