Talks aimed at reviving home rule in Northern Ireland and disbanding IRA guerrillas ended on Saturday without a final deal, British and Irish Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern said.
"If agreement cannot be reached when it is clear that it should be reached we will find a different way to move this process forward," Blair told a news conference at the end of the three-day conference at Leeds Castle in southern England.
Blair said Northern Ireland's politicians had been unable to reach a compromise on the wide-ranging changes to the operation of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement being demanded by the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party. "It was not possible ... to secure total agreement on the institutional issues," Ahern added at Blair's side.
Blair said that despite the breakthrough, he believed significant progress had been made on persuading the Irish Republican Army to disarm and effectively wind itself up as an active guerrilla group.
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