The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and the British prime minister, Mr Blair, meet in Armagh today to try to move the Northern Ireland political process forward. They arrive with plans to announce that the Northern Ireland Assembly will be reconvened, with a deadline of November to agree on a resumption of power-sharing.
They are attempting, against the odds perhaps, to knock the two sides, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin, together, to create the initiative. There is a vacuum which is impeding the implementation of the Belfast Agreement and they are doing their best to break it.
The circumstances in which they meet, however, could not be less conducive to progress. The murder of the self-confessed British spy, Denis Donaldson, in Donegal on Tuesday will affect their efforts. It has set the conspiracy theorists into a spin. Was it the IRA who killed him? Did they do it with the knowledge of Sinn Féin? What possible motive could either organisation have for doing so? If not them, whose interests did it serve? These are among the valid questions now raised.
Both Dublin and London have refused to be deflected by Tuesday's murder. If the motive was to derail their efforts, both the Irish and the British governments are saying that there is no evidence linking the IRA to the Donaldson murder. Mr Ahern and Mr Blair accept, however, that the political process will be at an end if any such evidence were to emerge.
The murder of Mr Donaldson takes place in a context where Mr Ahern justified his decision to proceed with an initiative today by referring to the general election looming in this State by next year and hinted at the expected political transition in Britain when Tony Blair steps down as prime minister. These are real political constraints on both men, who have driven this process in an unprecedented inter-governmental co-operation for the last nine years and are anxious to see it bear fruit.
Another extended period of political vacuum is unacceptable to them - and increasingly to public opinion in the Republic and the North of Ireland as well. The political parties there must be confronted with these realities and given a final opportunity to respond positively to them.
However, it now seems that it will be impossible for the DUP, the SDLP and Sinn Féin to proceed with today's political initiative without the immediate clarification of the Independent Monitoring Commission. The commission judged that the IRA had ceased its activities recently. To any impartial observer, the IMC will now become the adjudicator of whether the IRA, Sinn Féin, or any of its parts, or any other organs, were responsible for the killing of Mr Donaldson. Time only will tell.
In the meantime, the Rev Ian Paisley, who is 80 today, has to decide whether he will be chief minister of Northern Ireland in the final phase of his career. To achieve that aim, he has to trust Sinn Féin. The timing is not auspicious.