Transcripts courtesy of the Northern Ireland Information Service
 

Program: BBC News 24
Date & Time: June 27, 05 (12.49)
Subject: The prospect for agreement

KEN REID

Prime Minister, just looking forward to your meeting with the Taoiseach this afternoon and the hope for an IRA statement sometime in the future, how difficult do you envisage it will be to persuade unionists that republicans are for real this time, considering what has happened in the past?

TONY BLAIR

I think it is going to be very difficult to persuade unionism of the sincerity of any republican move, which is why that move have got to be clear and bold. Because then it will have to result, if the republicans do give up violence once and for all, it will have to result in a proper powersharing executive in which the republicans are able to take their place at the democratic table and so it is immensely important that they do make this move. 

I don’t know whether they will or not, but of course, you know better than me, it would be daft to say after the events earlier this year that the credibility threshold was going to be easy to pass, but it can be passed I am sure of that, if the IRA recognise that this is a one off opportunity to accept what is now inevitable, which is that the only way you are ever going to pursue the cause that people believe in Northern Ireland from the republican point of view, is peacefully. 

It won’t happen any other way and political progress has achieved a lot in Northern Ireland, but we have got to go on and make it achieve more. So you know it will be difficult, but on the other hand if it is done and it is done genuinely and violence is genuinely given up, then the obligation then transfers to unionists to make sure that they drop their opposition to going into a powersharing executive and that is the situation really.