LEEDS CASTLE (AFP) - Northern Ireland's rival Protestant and Roman Catholic parties are being left to find common ground on their own, after three days of intensive high-level talks failed to come up with a deal to revive power-sharing government in the province.
"There is nothing more for us to do in a long negotiation like this any more," Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday following the talks which he co-chaired with Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern at Leeds Castle.
"We've been through absolutely everything we need to go through, and we are determined now to move this thing forward," he added late Saturday.
The job of mediating between the two sides now falls back to Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen and Paul Murphy, the British minister for Northern Ireland. They will begin a fresh round of meetings in Belfast on Tuesday.
Power-sharing government in Northern Ireland was enshrined in the Good Friday accords of 1998 which ended three decades of sectarian strife, but it was suspended in October 2002 amid a breakdown in confidence.
Blair and Ahern said significant progress had been made at Leeds Castle, and that for the first time, they saw the disbanding of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the main Catholic paramilitary group, as a real possibility.
"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," the two leaders said in a joint statement.
"We've basically resolved the contours of the paramilitary question," Blair said, calling it the "big issue" that had long hampered fulfilment of the Good Friday agreement.
By multiple accounts from inside the venue at Leeds Castle, southeast England, the IRA was prepared to make a major concession 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."
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) and its demands for an overhaul of the Good Friday pact.
Ian Paisley, the 78-year-old firebrand leader of the DUP, said his 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."
To which Adams retorted to reporters: "How can any party come to negotiate and not negotiate, not make any contribution, not meet with other parties?"
The DUP refused to meet face-to-face with Sinn Fein at Leeds Castle, even though they are the two biggest parties in Northern Ireland and would have to sit together in any restored power-sharing government.
Instead it was left to Blair and Ahern to shuttle between the two sides -- although observers noted that the fact that Sinn Fein and the DUP were under the same roof was a mark of progress from just a few years ago.
Ahern, the Irish prime minister, warned that whatever comes out of subsequent discussions, "the fundamentals of the Good Friday agreement are not up for debate".