Mr David Andrews and the Northern Secretary are to make urgent contact to try to meet the concerns of the two loyalist parties and keep them in the Stormont talks, which resume on Monday.
While Dr Mo Mowlam arranged yesterday to meet loyalist prisoners in the Maze later this week, the Minister for Foreign Affairs was also attempting to assure loyalists that they were not "bit players" in the peace process.
Mr Andrews, after a 90-minute meeting with a top-level Progressive Unionist Party delegation at Hillsborough, said he was to have "urgent" discussions with Dr Mowlam to examine how the two governments could keep the two loyalist parties involved in the peace process.
Dr Mowlam, by meeting the Ulster Democratic Party in London, and Mr Andrews, with his Hillsborough encounter with the PUP, reflected the anxieties of the British and Irish governments over whether these parties would remain in the peace process, and more importantly whether their UDA and UVF paramilitary connections would maintain their ceasefires.
The PUP executive had been due to meet last night to decide whether to remain in the talks.
A measure of the success of yesterday's meeting with Mr Andrews, and an earlier meeting on Monday with Dr Mowlam, was that the party has put back that decision until later in the week to see if the two governments can devise a package to satisfy them.
Mr David Ervine, chief spokesman for the PUP, said much of yesterday's meeting with Mr Andrews was good and positive. "There were elements of positivity in that meeting, which would suggest there were elements of negativity at the meeting," he added.
His colleague, Mr Billy Hutchinson, said he still believed the PUP should withdraw from the talks, and he would argue that point with the party's executive if in the meantime the two governments did not deliver.
He complained that loyalists were being "treated as bit players" in the talks process.
He wanted confidence-building measures, and not just talk. "I want to see action," said Mr Hutchinson.
What he was saying had nothing to do with threatening an end to the UVF ceasefire, he said. "This is not connected with ceasefires, it is not connected to concessions. It is a case of a point of principle where if people are going to be elected to the peace process, then they all should have equal say," added Mr Hutchinson.
If there was an eleventh-hour change in attitude by the two governments, then he would argue that the PUP should remain in the talks.
Mr Andrews described the meeting as "useful, frank and friendly". The main feature of the discussions was the disquiet in the community represented by the PUP.
"They made a point, which I agree with, that the integrity of the talks process is being undermined by the fact that too much is happening outside the process itself and too little inside it. I was strongly sympathetic to that position," he said.
"I undertook to seek to ensure that all parties are treated as equal participants in the talks," Mr Andrews added. He said he would make urgent contact with Dr Mowlam to try to meet loyalist concerns. He believed his encounter with the PUP was hopeful.
Mr Andrews later met the SDLP Lord Mayor of Belfast, Mr Alban Maginness, and later a Sinn Fein delegation.
Mr Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, said afterwards that progress could only be achieved if all parties would sit down and talk.
