David Trimble has called for the IRA to be more open about the way it has destroyed weapons.

The Ulster Unionist leader said on Sunday that efforts to decommission the republican group's arsenal had been "too secret".

Trimble said there was "no point" to the latest initiative because it was not transparent to the public.

"The simple truth of the matter is that invisible acts don't really weigh very much with the general public," he said.

Further evidence that the two sides are as far apart as ever came from Sinn Fein's president Gerry Adams.

He said he had still not received a satisfactory explanation to why the peace process had stalled.

"The problem is there is a failure or a refusal to accept both the integrity and the independence of the independent commission," he told the BBC.

Adams argued that all sides had agreed to the original process that set out how weapons decommissioning would be verified.

"Those guns are silenced. We have to allow the commission to do its work. There's huge anger and frustration within republicanism that republicans have done all of this, and had nothing in return," he said.

Adams also revealed that negotiations between the two sides had continued but there had been no new progress.

His comments came as it was revealed that Tony Blair and the Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern had spoken by phone at the weekend.

Trimble said the collapse of the peace negotiations had been predicted long before it happened.

"We said to Gerry Adams months ago that there was no point in secret decommissioning," he said."It has to be done in a way to maximise public confidence. If I hadn't put the brakes on, the whole process would have crashed. It's still there, it's still rescuable."