Hope for N. Ireland peace package

Blair (left) and Ahern are hosting the talks

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Talks over the Northern Ireland peace accord have come to an end "with progress" but no agreement.

A peace package addressing all the issues discussed during the six days of talks in Staffordshire will be compiled by the British and Irish prime ministers and presented to the various interested parties.

A statement issued by prime ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern on Saturday said that "further negotiations were not necessary," but that movement towards peace was still possible.

The package will deal with the main sticking point of the talks -- paramilitary disarmament -- as well as reforms to the police force and a reduction in the size of numbers of British troops serving in the area.

No date has been set for the package to be given to the Protestant and Catholic groups, but Blair said it would be "as soon as possible."

"It is not that we failed to reach an agreement," Blair said.

Instead, they had found what the positions of the parties are, he added, so that a package can be put together which he "very much hoped would be accepted."

He added, that the "overwhelming desire" was to get an agreement and to move forward on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

"I do not contemplate failure," he said.

Ahern said the talks had looked into the issues "completely" and that they had been a "success."

But the tense talks, which had overrun their initial two-day schedule, had been tense and had never gone beyond the bilateral stage.

Earlier on Saturday David Trimble, leader of the protestant Ulster Unionists and former head of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, returned home to Belfast.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams said he would welcome receiving the package of measures, but added: "The threat to this process doesn't come from the weapons of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) which are silenced."

The threat came from the plastic bullets that were still being used and from loyalist weapons, he said.

Adams said: "There is a hope out there and which was not there a decade or more ago, so I certainly hope they will bring back a package, and not just a package but a package that can deliver the Good Friday Agreement."

SDLP leader John Hume said "considerable disappointment" was natural, given the failure to deliver the agreement in full.

There had been progress on policing and while there were issues standing in the way of creating a force supported by both sides, "that goal can now be reached", he said.

Weapons decommissioning had to take place within the framework of the agreement, according to Mr Hume.

However, viewing it as a pre-condition to progress on other issues such as demilitarisation would result in "stalemate and the loss of hope for a new beginning."