The leader of Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's main Catholic party and the political ally of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), said yesterday he believed his Protestant rivals were ready to agree to a peace deal. But Gerry Adams said he had yet to receive a telephone call from US President George W Bush, who tried to help break a deadlock in the British-ruled province by contacting Protestant leader Ian Paisley. Bush had also planned to talk to Adams, a spokeswoman said. Britain and Ireland are trying to push Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) into agreeing to share power over the province with Sinn Fein - a previously unthinkable alliance. "I think he (Paisley) will do a deal," Adams said. "He wants to do a deal on his terms. He has to do a deal on terms that are acceptable to the rest of us," he added. The DUP was unavailable for comment. Paisley said his party needed to be assured that the IRA had put down its weapons for good. The DUP plans to meet retired Canadian General John de Chastelain, head of an international body overseeing guerilla disarmament, today, while Paisley, a 78-year-old hardliner, is set to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair tomorrow. Last week Paisley raised a long list of questions about the Anglo-Irish peace plan. London has tried to answer them and Paisley will give his response tomorrow. Adams called again for London and Dublin to restore home rule even if the DUP rejects the deal. "If the DUP does not come aboard ... then the governments have to press ahead," he said. Compromise has never been a word associated with Paisley, but this week the Protestant firebrand holds the keys to power-sharing with Catholics in Northern Ireland. Paisley and the DUP never embraced the Good Friday pact, as it rejected ever doing business with Sinn Fein. The DUP, long suspicious of any move that might lead to Northern Ireland no longer being part of the United Kingdom, has refused to agree to renewed power-sharing so long as the IRA exists. On Friday, US President George W Bush spoke by telephone to Paisley, and was also reportedly planning to call Adams, urging them to resolve the deadlock. "Hopefully it will help," he said. In Belfast, Paisley summed up his version of the transatlantic conversation: "I told him I would like to be in a position to make a deal, but that any deal must be fair.". Paisley wants the IRA - still observing a ceasefire in its armed struggle against British rule - to be wound up as a paramilitary organisation, and for it to give up all its guns and explosives by the end of the year. Many analysts doubt, however, whether the IRA - which sees itself as the guardian of Northern Ireland's Catholic minority - will agree to a specific DUP demand for "decommissioning" to be fully photographed. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's party and the political ally of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Northern Ireland, November 26, 2004. (Reuters)