The British government is not prepared to "throw in the towel" on efforts to revive the Northern Ireland assembly, Paul Murphy has said.

The Ulster secretary was speaking as Unionist leader David Trimble was set to hold face-to-face talks with Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams.

The Stormont assembly has been suspended since October of last year, following allegations of IRA spying.

"We want an election to happen. We want the democratic process to go forward," Murphy told BBC Radio Ulster on Wednesday.

"But at the same time we want to make sure that people understand that an assembly on its own isn't the answer to the problems of the institutions. We have to have a government as well.

"I am not going to pre-empt what is going to come out over the next couple of days and weeks with regards to the negotiations. Our view in the government is clear: we want elections to happen but we equally say we are trying to ensure that we get an executive.

"I think to throw in the towel at an early stage and say we just want an assembly and we will let the executive sort itself out isn't being fair to the people of Northern Ireland. Nor is it right in terms of the agreement itself."

However, Gerry Adams insisted that there would be no discussions of a gesture by the IRA without a date for the Stormont elections.

"We have made it very, very clear that we are not going to the IRA until we get a date certain, publicly proclaimed, of an election," he said.

"That is going to be the accelerator of the process. There is so much angst and anger in republicanism at the way the British government rejected initiatives by the IRA leadership on the one hand and by me on the other and then they went on to compound all of that by cancelling the election.

"There might not be a lot in it for the IRA unless there has been a process and at the moment we don't have a process. We don't have elections in the way they need to be unequivocally set out.

"People need to have some sort of confidence that this British government is not going to take an a la carte attitude to the agreement and we need to have some sense of how policing powers are going to be transferred, the institutions are going to be sustained over the long term and issues like the Human Rights Commission, which is in a mess."