Still time in Northern Ireland?

A Trimble pull-out would almost certainly bring a review of the Good Friday agreement

By CNN European Political Editor Robin Oakley

LONDON, England (CNN) -- There is still time to prevent the collapse of the power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and yet another severe setback for the peace process. But only just.

If the Ulster Unionists led by David Trimble are to be dissuaded from resigning from the power-sharing executive and bringing down the devolved government, it will take the start of real, verifiable decommissioning of arms by the IRA.

And it may be too late for even that to make a difference.

If the Ulster Unionists do refuse to sit alongside Sinn Fein any more, then Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid would almost certainly be forced to reimpose direct rule from London and to start a review of the functioning of the Good Friday Agreement.

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It will be the latest in a series of setbacks to peace, initiated when in the British general election in June the moderate SDLP and David Trimble's mainstream Unionist party lost support while the comparative hardliners of Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party advanced.

Since then disillusion with the IRA's commitment to peace has grown with the news of IRA men detained in Colombia. And Northern Ireland's image has plummeted again with the explosion of sectarian violence over the route to school taken by Catholic girls in the Ardoyne.

After a disfiguring summer of riots, disturbances and sectarian killings, on a lesser scale than in the "bad old days" but significantly increased over recent times, Reid has announced that ceasefires previously declared by the Protestant Ulster Defence Association and Loyalist Volunteer Force are no longer recognised.

In an additional blow John Hume and Seamus Mallon, the two leading moderate figures in the SDLP over the past two decades, have both said they will be stepping down.

The only positive signs to set against that have been the condemnations of terrorist violence in the wake of the September 11 atrocities in New York by Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and McGuinness's pledge that he was working "flat out" to get the IRA to put its arms beyond use.

With the Unionist community now bitterly disillusioned by a Good Friday Agreement which it regards as having resulted in a long series of concessions to republicanism and with cross-community violence back as an almost nightly occurrence the prospects for the peace process are more grim than they have been for a long while.

But if McGuinness does achieve a breakthrough with real and verifiable arms decommissioning by the IRA it could just save the Unionist walkout and the collapsing of the institutions at the very last minute. And that, after all, is the traditional moment for most actions on the Northern Ireland scene.