A much-postponed meeting of the British-Irish Council will be held in Dublin tomorrow amid hopes that the Northern Ireland peace process has been revived.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, will play host to the British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair and leaders from Scotland, Wales and the Channel Islands at Dublin Castle. It will be the first meeting of the body since the inaugural meeting was held in London in December 1999.
The main focus of the meeting will be to assure the public that the cross-border institutions set up under the Belfast Agreement are functional, despite recent threats to the peace process.
Another of the main topics of the meeting will be the war on drug trafficking, and how to coordinate efforts across Ireland and Britain to combat it.
The council meeting will be followed by a meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council, whose work has been hampered by Mr David Trimble's bar to participation of Sinn Féin ministers Ms Bairbre de Brun and Mr Martin McGuinness. That injunction was removed after the IRA began decommissioning last month.
