THE future of the multi party peace talks in the North may hinge on the plenary session which opens at Stormont on Monday and now seems certain to continue until mid week.
The independent chairman, Senator George Mitchell, will face his most testing challenge since the talks began on June 10th, as he presides over a session which will finally determine whether or not the process can produce results.
This meeting will demonstrate conclusively whether the talks can, first of all, produce agreement on procedural rules which will enable them to begin to make decisions.
Earlier this week, the two governments and seven of the nine political parties participating in the talks, appeared to arrive at a conditional agreement on the rules of procedure.
The exceptions were the Democratic Unionist Party and Mr Robert McCartney's UK Unionist Party. These have sponsored a series of amendments to the set of rules drawn up in a compromise package by Senator Mitchell.
Each of these amendments, in turn, will have to be voted on, in the first decision making votes undertaken since the talks began.
The DUP leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, has conceded that a set of procedural rules is likely to be voted through - but not unanimously. But the DUP will insist on each of its nine amendments being debated and put to the meeting, thus confronting Mr David Trimble's UUP with the challenge of supporting or opposing them.
Even if the plenary session survives this inevitably tortuous process, it will then immediately run into the new problems which have been raised in regard to the treatment of the decommissioning issue.
This will come to the fore as a major stumbling block when the plenary session attempts to find agreement on its opening agenda - a target which was sought unsuccessfully on Thursday.
However, if talks are forced to adjourn next week for a summer recess without even a specific agenda decided, they will patently have failed to meet the exhortations of the two governments and Senator Mitchell that they should demonstrate urgently that they have the capacity to move forward to substantive business.
Six weeks have already been "spent on laborious and relatively fruitless wrangling over basic procedures, and if the session ends in a further morass of uncertainty, several of the main parties will seriously reconsider their further participation at the resumption in September.
This week the unionists have been insistent on their proposal that decommissioning should be addressed immediately, by setting up some form of subcommittee which would explore the practicalities of the issue during the recess and report back to the reconvened session in September.
The SDLP, Alliance and the two loyalist parties, the UDP and PUP, see this as a return to the old unionist position of making decommissioning a primary and singular precondition, upon which progress must be made before there is any serious attempt to begin the three stranded meaningful negotiations in September.
A grim faced Mr David Ervine, of the PUP, emerged on Thursday evening to say that "there looks to be absolutely no likelihood of agreement in that room on the suggestions put forward by some of the parties".
He accused these parties of trying to build "a decommissioning cage, which I think neither ourselves or the republicans are likely to walk into".
These parties, he said, wanted decommissioning dealt with first and foremost - "to have it signed, sealed and delivered before they deal with any other issue".
If the talks process was merely about the demand for weaponry without dealing with the issues which caused people to have weapons, "then I think we're doomed to failure", he said.
The leader of the UDP, Mr Gary McMichael, also commented: "We certainly will not be agreeing on an agenda which tries to address decommissioning in a manner which is a stalling tactic and which keeps us from substantive negotiations."
The topic of decommissioning's has therefore, again become a major hurdle - even in regard to the basic preliminary work of deciding on an agenda for the talks.
Also causing further dissension is the issue of whether constitutional matters can be on the agenda, and if they are, if they can be a subject for negotiation or merely for discussion.
The DUP deputy leader, Mr Peter Robinson, has hinted that his party will withdraw from the talks if the North's constitutional position is on the agenda.
The UUP is more sanguine: its deputy leader, Mr John Taylor, asserted confidently that there would be no negotiation on this matter. He remarked that "you can never silence people from raising things in talks. But you certainly can control the agenda - and, we are controlling the agenda.
Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein claimed again yesterday that the process had run out of credibility and public confidence, and that a new and inclusive process was urgently needed.
On Monday, the participants will face what may be their last chance to breathe life into the process and demonstrate a joints purpose and determination to move ahead.