The Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams, has warned against placing too much significance on the latest round of consultations aimed at getting the Northern institutions working again.
Talks aimed at resolving the current impasse will continue next week in Belfast, the following week in Washington and the last week of March in Lisbon on the fringes of the EU summit.
However, Mr Adams warned yesterday that while consultations were important, too much significance should not be placed on what could be "recycled discussions we have all been through so many times in the past". He said the onus was now on the British government to restore the institutions and to replace the political centre of gravity.
"I am not interested at all in doing meetings just for the optics," he said after a one-and-a-half hour meeting with the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in Government Buildings.
Mr Adams said he had been single-mindedly devoted since the Belfast Agreement to all aspects of the peace process, including trying to resolve the decommissioning issue on terms which would be satisfactory to unionists.
"I have failed to do that because no terms have been acceptable to the unionists for a surrender by the IRA."
"If we are to find a way of resolving this issue we have to go back to the peace process. The Good Friday agreement is the only way. The reality is if the Good Friday agreement is not implemented, it is only a piece of paper when pieces of paper are useless in what is a very defining period in the history of the two islands."
Mr Adams said the Belfast Agreement had to work but had to be worked at. "You cannot have a situation where a British government tears up that agreement."
He warned if there was a long vacuum in the current impasse, the Irish Government might have to consider its own legal position in relation to the Southern leg of some of the institutions.
A Government spokesman last night described yesterday's meeting between Mr Adams and the Taoiseach as "useful".
Meanwhile, the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, yesterday said that now that we had amended Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution there was absolutely nothing to stop loyalists being the first to decommission.
"Beatings and murders within the loyalist community and the illegal use of loyalist arms are an almost daily feature of life in Northern Ireland.
"If loyalists made the first move on decommissioning they would prove their sincerity," Mr Bruton told a Rotary Club of Dublin meeting.