Britain and the IRA were under intense pressure to reveal details of the armed group's latest act of disarmament on Wednesday after a much trumpeted attempt to bring final peace to Northern Ireland ended in fiasco.

The province's main Protestant leader David Trimble was travelling to London for talks with British ministers a day after rejecting the Irish Republican Army's biggest weapons move as too secretive.

Trimble held a brief meeting with Gerry Adams, head of the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, late on Tuesday night, but analysts say the pair may find it hard going to bridge the gap.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish premier Bertie Ahern, who went to Belfast expecting to seal the most significant advance since the 1998 Good Friday peace deal, found themselves embarrassed and disappointed as the deal collapsed.

"A day which was supposed to herald a breakthrough instead ended in a messy breakdown," political commentator David McKittrick wrote in Wednesday's Independent newspaper. "It will all take some time to put right."

Britain had set in train a carefully orchestrated sequence of events by declaring elections to Northern Ireland's powersharing assembly would be held on November 26.

Then the IRA issued a statement saying a substantial cache of the weapons that sustained its long and bloody campaign against British rule had been "put beyond use".

John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general charged with overseeing guerrilla disarmament, confirmed the IRA had destroyed automatic rifles, explosives and other weapons.

But although the general said the move involved more weapons than two previous acts of IRA disarmament, he gave no details and his report was dismissed as too secretive by Trimble's pro-British unionists.

Trimble, whose mainstream Ulster Unionists face stiff competition from the hardline Democrat Unionist Party in the fight for Protestant votes, said the lack of detail meant he could not go any further with the deal.

Michael McGimpsey, a chief negotiator for the Ulster Unionists, laid the blame squarely at the feet of Sinn Fein and what he called their "private army", the IRA.

"We are five and a half years down this road of peace, we've had 30 years of terrorist violence. I think we are all entitled to a little bit of clarity and a little bit of transparency and that is what we are asking for," he told BBC radio.

An Ulster Unionist source told Reuters the party leader believed the problem could be solved with more clarity from the IRA and the British government. "It's sortable, everything is sortable," the source said.

Commentators say Trimble calculates he needs a@dramatic gesture from the IRA to persuade increasingly sceptical Protestants to continue backing the Good Friday deal, which many believe has benefited the minority Catholic community more.

Paul Dixon, a lecturer in politics at the University of Ulster, pointed out that although the 1998 accord was strongly backed in a referendum, there has only ever been a slim majority in favour of it among Protestant voters.

"It's not enough for words, even words from the prime minister any more. Unionists want to see the hardware -- which is why they thought they might have videoed (the arms destruction), or had a photograph, or at least a detailed inventory."

Britain suspended the Northern Ireland Assembly and other powersharing institutions in October 2002, ushering in new era of uncertainty. Unionists had refused to stay in government with Sinn Fein after the IRA was accused of operating a spy ring.

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