Sinn Féin leaders Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness held a secret meeting with the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, last week as part of a new initiative to try to restore devolution to Northern Ireland, according to informed sources.
The confidential meeting took place in London on Wednesday and was followed the day after by a publicised meeting in Dublin between the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness.
Based on these meetings and other political developments, Mr Ahern and Mr Blair decided to hold a summit at Chequers on Saturday to assess the potential for calling Assembly elections in October or November.
This decision also follows from a Sinn Féin briefing on Monday stating that there was no prospect of any further initiatives from the IRA in the absence of elections. The benign interpretation of this statement was that if Mr Blair called autumn elections there would be a positive response from the IRA.
The British and Irish governments are hoping that a new set of sequencing acts, primarily involving movement from the IRA, can be set in train to allow autumn elections, well-placed sources told The Irish Times.
In addition to Saturday's summit, senior British and Irish officials are in contact with key political players in Northern Ireland to determine, among several issues, whether Mr David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party will reciprocate movement from the IRA, they added.
The sources said the current political movement was the start of a process to bring republicans back to and beyond the position of last April and May, when the IRA signalled it would carry out further decommissioning and begin a process of ending paramilitary activity.
"There are a lot of hints out there of what people might be prepared to do, but nothing concrete. Matters are very much at the exploratory stage," said one senior source. Ahead of any speculation of a breakthrough, there would have to be "private" understandings" between the governments, republicans and Ulster Unionists about how each would respond to certain sequencing acts such as elections, IRA gestures, and an Ulster Unionist preparedness to accept autumn elections.
The same source said that were Mr Blair to call elections, he could only do so in the context of some fresh development from republicans. This could be an act of decommissioning and perhaps some IRA wording indicating the IRA would cease all activity, as Mr Blair requested in his "acts of completion" speech last October.
The International Monitoring Commission should be in place by that stage to test whether the IRA was ceasing activity.
"Where this all ends depends on the quality of what republicans might deliver," the source said, adding that what was on offer from the IRA last April was significant but not sufficient to provide guarantees that the IRA would deliver the required "acts of completion" to allow Ulster Unionists go back into the Executive with Sinn Féin ministers.
Sinn Féin president Mr Adams, who met his Assembly team at Stormont yesterday, hoped that after the Chequers summit "we should get some sense of an election date". He said he hoped to arrange a meeting with Mr Trimble shortly. "Without elections I don't see any prospect of resuscitating this process," he added.
"It remains my conviction that we will eventually get to the point where we have a democratic settlement, but that is a collective responsibility and others can't stand back and make demands of republicans while they are the very people who brought about the situation in which we all find ourselves."
- The search for the remains of "disappeared" teenager Columba McVeigh is to move into its third day today in part of a remote bogland in north Co Monaghan, writes Joe Humphreys.
A digger operated by gardaí continued yesterday to work at the scene where Mr McVeigh is alleged to have been buried 28 years ago after being kidnapped and murdered by the IRA. Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, one of the joint-commissioners on the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains, visited the site yesterday.