FIVE of the DUP’s nine MPs, and its press officer, will be in America on Thursday when Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern unveil their “final” proposals to revive the Stormont assembly, writes Liam Clarke.

The delegation will be led by deputy leader Peter Robinson, and will include Jeffrey Donaldson and Gregory Campbell, as well as chief press officer Timothy Johnston.

The absence of more than half the MPs from the largest party in the province underlines both the low expectations of the event and the fact that Ian Paisley’s party is broadly satisfied with what will be proposed.

The government plans include reconvening the assembly for six weeks in May, then suspending it for the summer and reconvening in the autumn, perhaps after a series of all-party talks. The cut-off date for forming an executive does not come until November 24.

By then, the International Monitoring Commission will have issued two further reports on the IRA, one in April and one in October. If the IMC does not give the IRA a clean bill of health on criminality as well as violence, the DUP will be under little pressure to move the assembly from shadow mode into full power-sharing.

This is as long a delay as the party could have asked for, and it may be able to use the time to secure changes in the architecture of the Good Friday agreement and the power-sharing executive.

The American trip is designed to present the DUP at its most pragmatic, to convince the US administration and Irish-American opinion that the party will do a deal if the conditions are right. Hardliners such as Paisley, his son Ian Jr, Nigel Dodds and William McCrea are noticeably absent from the delegation.

The delegation is scheduled to meet 30 senators and congressmen, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, as well as State Department and White House officials and the editorial boards of a number of newspapers.

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