The Irish Republican Army has agreed to let two Catholic and Protestant church officials witness the outlawed group's next act of disarmament and describe it afterward, officials in the British and Irish governments indicated Tuesday.
Officials in both governments, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the IRA was offering the move as a way to inspire greater public confidence in the group's handover of weapons to disarmament officials. Previous disarmament moves have been shrouded in total secrecy.
Both governments plan to present Northern Ireland parties Wednesday with joint plans for driving forward the Good Friday peace accord of 1998. In the document, officials said, are details on the IRA's proposed next peace moves, principally on disarmament.
The primary goal of the current effort is to revive a joint Catholic-Protestant administration for Northern Ireland, the central objective of the 6-year-old peace deal.
The major Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists, refuses to form a coalition with Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party backed by most Catholics, until the IRA fully disarms and disbands.
Intensive negotiations in September produced apparently detailed plans from Sinn Fein for such IRA moves, but the shadowy group itself has remained silent on the matter.
A previous four-party coalition involving Sinn Fein suffered several breakdowns over the IRA's refusal to disarm, then collapsed in October 2002 over an IRA spying scandal.
The IRA did hand an unspecified amount of weaponry to disarmament officials on three occasions from October 2001 to October 2003 in an effort to keep power-sharing going, but Protestant leaders rejected the moves as too vague.
The IRA's reported offer to allow religious representatives to accompany disarmament officials would fall far short of Protestant demands for the process to be public and detailed.
Democratic Unionist leaders say they want the IRA to allow John de Chastelain, a retired Canadian general who has overseen disarmament efforts since 1997, to provide a precise inventory of IRA weapons "decommissioned" to date, the method used for their disposal, and an estimate of how much of the IRA's arsenal remains.
Sinn Fein has rejected these conditions as designed to humiliate the IRA, which called an open-ended truce in 1997 but never formally admitted defeat in its efforts to abolish Northern Ireland. The predominantly Protestant territory was created in 1921, shortly before the mostly Catholic rest of Ireland won independence from Britain.
The IRA and anti-Catholic paramilitary groups were supposed to disarm fully by mid-2000 under terms of the Good Friday deal, but none did. The other armed groups' political representatives attract little electoral support and play little role in the power-sharing negotiations.
The IRA is by far Northern Ireland's best-armed and most sophisticated paramilitary group. Police say most of its weaponry, supplied by Libya in the mid-1980s, is stored in hidden rural bunkers in the neighboring Republic of Ireland. The IRA's most prized munition is Semtex, a Czech-made plastic explosive that can be stored for decades.