The problem, says one source who has attended all marathon talks in the past year, is very simple. The UUP refuses to agree to the formation of an all-party executive because it does not trust Sinn Fein's commitments on decommissioning.
The problem thus stated is therefore not fundamentally about decommissioning or devolution. It is about a lack of trust. That lack of trust exists between two relevant parties: the UUP and Sinn Fein.
Yet in the past three weeks these two parties have met just once. During the week of intense "pressure cooker" talks at Castle Buildings before and after the June 30th "absolute deadline" for progress, Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness suggested that they would address the UUP Assembly party. Mr Blair encouraged the UUP to take up the offer, but the UUP said No.
"Every time they have met there has been a useful outcome", according to Dublin Government sources. "But they haven't met enough. The bottom line is the business must be done between the UUP and Sinn Fein."
The view forming in Government circles is that direct engagement between these two parties offers the only hope for progress.
During the talks at Castle Buildings, no matter how often Mr Ahern and Mr Blair said they believed the IRA would decommission, the UUP would not believe them.
Says a Government source: "It doesn't matter what the governments do. We can give all the guarantees in the world, but unless the parties believe us, there is no point. That's what we have to address now."
So while Mr Blair and Mr Ahern will meet at Downing Street on Tuesday once again to attempt to plot the way forward, they are likely to take a less prominent role in driving the political process than heretofore. Instead, they are expected to ask Senator George Mitchell to attempt to facilitate agreement where they have thus far failed.
Senator Mitchell is said to know every participant in the talks, and more importantly to have a very subtle grasp of the fears and prejudices that inform their political positions.
He is expected to be asked to meet the Northern parties within the next fortnight to make a preliminary assessment of where the process should go. The political process would then be parked until the autumn.
But the Government is determined that "the autumn" does not become October or November. Nationalists and republicans fear that some Ulster Unionists would like to drag out the process into next year, thus making real the prospect that it will "crash" into the May 2000 deadline for total decommissioning specified in the Belfast Agreement.
The Government insists it believes the parties will be back involved in a "serious, narrow, focused" review of the non-implementation of the agreement in early September. "We know what the issue is. It's not complicated," says a Government source.
While the two governments will be represented at any new round of talks in September, it is likely they will be represented by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Northern Secretary rather than the Taoiseach and Prime Minister.
UUP disbelief of guarantees about decommissioning from Sinn Fein and the two governments could be rectified by an IRA statement. The Government is to continue to press for this, but has no confidence it will succeed in the light of the IRA's refusal to issue a statement so far.
The Government is also likely to resist UUP demands for further changes to the "failsafe" legislation outlining what happens if any party in the executive defaults on commitments in the Belfast Agreement, such as decommissioning. Last Wednesday the UUP held intense discussions with British officials seeking to insert extra penalties into the legislation that would come into effect should the IRA not begin to disarm.
These proposed penalties included a suggestion that further releases of paramilitary prisoners should be tied to progress on decommissioning. There was also a proposal that if the institutions of the Belfast Agreement were suspended as a result of a default on decommissioning, the Assembly - the unionists' favourite institution - should meet on more than the two occasions provided for already in the British legislation. There was a suggestion that a specific timetable for decommissioning should also be included in the legislation.
None of these proposals was accepted, and the Government will resist suggestions that they be reconsidered. The hope, expressed by one official yesterday, is that the parties will discuss how to build trust. Discussing penalties and sanctions involves an assumption that there is no trust.
The Government also believes that the events in the Northern Ireland Assembly chamber on Thursday might yet have a cathartic impact on the process. The nomination of Sinn Fein members to ministries - even though the new executive was disbanded almost the moment it was formed - may have had the psychological effect of preparing unionists for the reality that there will be Sinn Fein ministers, sources suggest. This could make the formation of an executive in the autumn easier, they argue.
The amendments to Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, which would have come into effect on Monday had the institutions been formed and power devolved to them, have again been postponed. On June 2nd the Dail passed legislation extending for one year the period during which a declaration bringing the amendments into force can be made.
Last year's referendum on the Belfast Agreement specified that the amendments to the Constitution would be brought into force by the Government when the full range of institutions in the agreement were established and powers devolved to them. The Government had intended to meet tomorrow to make the necessary declaration, but that meeting will not happen as a result of the failure to establish the executive.
