The head of the decommissioning body, Gen John de Chastelain, has indicated to the DUP that the IRA would carry out more credible acts of decommissioning in the event of a political deal.
A DUP delegation, led by deputy leader Mr Peter Robinson, which met the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) in Belfast yesterday afternoon, left that meeting obviously more positive about the prospects of IRA disarmament.
Gen de Chastelain returned to Belfast from Canada yesterday ahead of the Leeds Castle talks.
Mr Robinson told reporters there must be a "visual" element to any new act of IRA decommissioning, although he was not defining how it should make any new disarmament event or events "transparent".
"If they want to bring Spielberg and make a movie I would be very satisfied with that. We have not been prescriptive.
"We want to make clear that the important element is to do something that can convince the community in a way that they have not thus far been convinced that this act has taken place, but also that the scale and nature of it has taken place," he said.
"It is very clear that 10 years after someone calls a ceasefire that there would be an expectation that the weapons of war would have been decommissioned by now. They have not been, but they must be. And there can't be progress unless they are decommissioned in a way that is conclusive, verifiable, and transparent," said Mr Robinson.
In October 2003 a choreographed, sequenced deal that could have resulted in the restoration of the Stormont institutions collapsed when Gen de Chastelain said at a press conference in Hillsborough Castle that he could not provide details of a disarmament he had overseen.
Gen de Chastelain could have provided more detail but felt bound by a convention he had agreed with the IRA only to publicly disclose what it said he could disclose. This practice developed despite the fact there is nothing in the Belfast Agreement, or the decommissioning legislation, stating he could not reveal what was disarmed.
Gen de Chastelain was himself conscious of this failing in the whole decommissioning process and, it is understood, made his feelings known to the IRA and Sinn Féin. The British and Irish governments also expressed their frustration to Gen de Chastelain, and based on the DUP's assessment of its meeting with the IICD yesterday, it seems the general now believes there would be greater disclosure about any future IRA decommissioning.
The North Belfast MP Mr Nigel Dodds, who was also on the delegation, said the general conveyed the impression that any new IRA disarmament would be more convincing. "He seemed more confident than previously how things might go," he said.
Mr Dodds responded to Mr Gerry Adams's article in yesterday's Irish Times where he rejected DUP proposals to amend elements of the Belfast Agreement. "The tone of the article was negative and unhelpful. If Ian Paisley wrote or said something like that, there would have been no end of complaints," he said.
