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The Irish Republican Army is fading away in Northern Ireland and poses no security threat to the British territory, international experts concluded Wednesday in another landmark for peacemaking.

The governments of Britain and Ireland heralded the findings of the Independent Monitoring Commission as the effective death of the IRA – and appealed to Protestant leaders to respond by deepening their co-operation with Roman Catholics in the province's 16-month-old partnership government.

It has failed to meet for the past three months amid rising tensions and warnings that the coalition could unravel.

“This is a very important day in the political progress of Northern Ireland ... a moment when we should draw a line,” said Shaun Woodward, Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

He and Irish leaders said the report from the four fact-finders – including former directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Scotland Yard's anti-terror unit – had eliminated the IRA as a diplomatic barrier.

“This report demonstrates not only that PIRA has gone away, but that it won't be coming back,” said Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, using the outlawed group's full formal name of Provisional IRA.

The commission concluded that the IRA's seven-man command responsible for directing the group's terror campaign for decades is “no longer operational or functional.”

It said the IRA had decided it would not publicly announce the disbanding of particular parts – but all of its military-focused units are already disbanded and the rest of the organization are dying day by day from inactivity.

“We believe that for some time now it (the IRA) has given up what it used to do and that by design it is being allowed to wither away,” said the 20-page report, which the British and Irish governments had received confidentially Monday. “There have not been and we do not foresee that there will be formal announcements about the disbandment of all or parts of the structure.”

The Protestant leader of the Northern Ireland administration, First Minister Peter Robinson, offered no immediate comment.

His Democratic Unionist Party has refused to build closer relations with Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party that represents most Catholics, citing the continued existence of the IRA. In particular, Britain had hoped to transfer control of Northern Ireland's police and justice system to local hands by May.

But Mr. Robinson has argued that this cannot happen until Protestants are confident that Sinn Fein is fully law-abiding. He said Tuesday that this would require the formal disbandment of the IRA command, which is officially called the “army council.”

Mr. Woodward, however, said he expects local politicians to quit using the IRA as a reason not to co-operate with Sinn Fein, and he expressed hope that Mr. Robinson's Democratic Unionists would agree once they had time to read the report.

“As a military organization, (the IRA) doesn't function, the organization has been allowed to fall into disuse, the IRA is withering away. That, actually, is what everyone wanted,” Mr. Woodward told a news conference at his Hillsborough Castle residence near Belfast. “We could spend a month on the semantics of this, but the reality is that this terrifying organization has come to an end and we have to recognize that.”

The Provisional IRA killed about 1,775 people during a failed 27-year ampaign (from 1970 to 1997) to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. In 2005, the group completed the handover of its hidden weapons dumps to disarmament officials and renounced violence for political purposes.