WITH the clock ticking relentlessly towards Tony Blair's make-or-break midnight deadline for an agreement to save the Northern Ireland peace process, the flickering hope of a deal still keeps at bay the dread consequences of failure - the return to the years of bloodshed.

There is no doubt that, in imposing this time limit for a resolution of the disarmament deadlock - the principal obstacle to progress and lasting peace - and insisting there is no "Plan B," the Prime Minister has taken a massive gamble.

If he wins, history will grant him and his efforts for peace in Ulster lasting eminence and unfairly bestow only a footnote to those of his predecessor, John Major.

But he has been right to be so bold.

For what has been needed throughout has been a catalyst for compromise.

And, hopefully, it exists in this pressure that Mr Blair has injected into the process to turn the Good Friday agreement into the establishment of a governmental executive in Belfast that spans the sectarian divide in Ulster.

It is, of course, evident that the parties - particularly those like Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists - have even at the eleventh hour still to show themselves capable of going further than they, as political bodies, may wish. But the pressure that they must accede to in conceding greater compromise should be the political will of the people of Ulster and Ireland which, especially after two years of ceasefire, is clearly for the rejection of violence and for a political settlement.

In setting the clock ticking, Mr Blair perhaps taps this mood and holds it up to the political parties in Northern Ireland to remind them that what they must now represent is not the intransigent hard-line views of the entrenched minority whose roots are stuck in mutual hate, but a majority in which the older groups are sick of bigotry and violence and a younger generation which rejects and fails to understand the old hatreds .

If these politicians fail to understand this and let the peace process fail as a result, how will they explain it to the people they are supposed to represent?

It is that awesome responsibility - and the consequences of a return to violence - that they have to confront today as the deadline approaches.

And if Sinn Fein cannot now commit itself in principle to the decommissioning of IRA weapons and the Unionists cannot sit down in the new Ulster executive with them without the actuality, then they will have forsaken not only the opportunity of compromise, but perhaps the whole peace process and also Ulster's entire people.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.