JOHN DE CHASTELAIN, the retired Canadian general brought in to verify IRA decommissioning, reminded his audience yesterday that he has been a player in the Northern Ireland peace process for almost a decade.

But if a week is a long time in politics, a decade can seem as brief as a coffee break in the glacial business of Ulster conflict resolution.

After a faux pas about waiting for the “starting gun” to begin the most important press conference of his life, the general acknowledged his lack of room for manoeuvre in describing what he had seen in previous IRA decommissioning acts.

The rules had been written by the Provisionals and they did not want any disclosure of the facts of the destruction of their weapons. In September 2003 it was his failure to say enough to impress Unionists that brought down David Trimble, whose determination to see the Good Friday agreement implemented — in spite of IRA intransigence — exhausted the voters’ patience.

So here was the general once more trying to make a convincing case that the Provos really had got rid of all their weapons this time. And here he was, facing the same problem all over again, hobbled by the IRA’s “confidentiality” rules.

There were no photographs, no videos, no handout lists of armaments, just the general’s assertion that he had witnessed the decommissioning of “very large quantities of arms, which we believe include all the arms in the IRA’s possession”.

It was a tougher audience than at his last appearance, because even the press has become thick-skinned about IRA “initiatives” which later turn out to be somewhat less than their original billing.

Feargal McKinney, UTV’s political reporter, suggested to the general that he had undermined Unionist confidence by admitting that all he had to go on that all the Provos’ weapons have now been decommissioned was the word of the terrorist group’s representative.

General de Chastelain said that the inventory of the weapons that he compiled during “a number of days” — which he has given to the British and Irish governments but which will not be published — was “consistent” with the estimates provided by British and Irish security forces.

The new feature was the introduction of two clergymen to witness the general’s work. The Rev Harold Good, a former president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, and Father Alex Reid, a Redemptorist priest who played a leading role in the 1970s and 1980s in getting IRA leaders to give up violence, gave an impressive performance. In some respects they were more convincing than the general.

Mr Good said: “We have spent many long days watching the painstaking way in which General de Chastelain went about his task of decommissioning huge amounts of explosives, arms and ammunition.”

Witnessing the process minute by minute gave him clear and incontrovertible evidence “that beyond any shadow of doubt the arms of the IRA have now been decommissioned”.

Yet however well-intentioned the participation was of the two clergymen, it still left a gulf of scepticism.

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