Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell on Friday called the Irish Republican Army’s promise to disarm “a significant step” toward lasting peace, but only if the group’s words were followed by deeds.

“I think this creates the opportunity to resume self-governance in Northern Ireland,” said Mitchell, who brokered the Good Friday peace accord there in 1998 that called for disarmament as a precursor to a stable Catholic-Protestant government.

In a telephone interview from his Seal Harbor home, Mitchell said the IRA’s Thursday announcement offered more hope than past calls for an end to the group’s armed campaign against British control of the territory.

“There have been many statements in the past, but never a renunciation of violence,” said Mitchell, who recently returned from Northern Ireland, where he serves as chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast.

Upon learning of the IRA’s intentions, Mitchell told his two young children, who travel with him, that he hoped change would be evident during their next trip to the region.

“I told them that I hoped by next summer the [Good Friday] agreement will be fully implemented, or on the way, and the local government will be up and running,” Mitchell said.

President Bill Clinton dispatched Mitchell to the conflicted region in 1995 as an “economic envoy.” Mitchell later mediated the 22 months of talks that produced the Good Friday peace agreement.

Mitchell, a former majority leader in the U.S. Senate, is now a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Piper Rudnick.