The IRA can join peace negotiations without immediately surrendering arms, Britain's top official here said Thursday.
Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Patrick Mayhew also said that an explosion or other sporadic violence during a three-month trial period following an IRA renunciation of violence would not necessarily wreck the deal.Mayhew's comments came a day after British and Irish leaders announced a framework for peace in Northern Ireland, putting pressure on IRA commanders to declare more than their usual Christmas cease-fire.
"If they had given up justifying the use of violence, we should be saying to them come to exploratory discussions, and high on the list of what will be relevant there is what you are going to do with your arms," Mayhew said in a radio interview.
Under the deal, the outlawed Irish Republican Army could join preliminary "talks about talks" within three months of renouncing violence.
Some months later, talks involving the British and Irish governments, the main constitutional parties in Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, and the IRA would begin.
The declaration by Prime Minister John Major of Britain and Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds solved nothing immediately and most of the principles had been enunciated before.
But in the strongest language yet it spelled out that Northern Ireland will remain part of United Kingdom as long as it is supported by the majority, who are Protestants. But it also envisages Irish unificiation as a possibility, and invites the IRA to achieve its goals through the democratic process.
The two governments hoped the set of principles would lead to an end to communal violence and create a better climate for negotiation and accommodation between pro-British Protestants and Irish-nationalist Catholics in the British-ruled province.
The cycle of political violence in Northern Ireland - involving the IRA, Protestant-based armed groups and British security forces - has claimed 3,100 lives since 1969.
Since 1990, the IRA has declared a three-day cease-fire each Christmas, and Major and Reynolds want to build on that opportunity this year.
"There is no excuse, no justification and no future for the use of violence," Major said. "Our determination to withstand terrorism if it continues is implacable."
Major said he and Reynolds agreed that the IRA "must renounce violence - not for a day or a week, but for good."
The men who run the IRA campaign will meet this weekend in secrecy to debate their response, IRA sources in the Irish capital, Dublin, said.