The Irish and British government's were today awaiting the latest independent assessment of IRA activity.
The Independent Monitoring Commission is due to hand over its latest report to both governments tomorrow and they in turn are expected to publish the report mid week.
However, the report is not expected to give the IRA a clean bill of health.
Ministers in London, Belfast and Dublin had hoped that following the IRA's announcement last August that they were calling a halt to their activities the report would confirm they had done so.
However the IMC, chaired by former Stormont Speaker Lord Alderdice, is understood to have agreed with recently leaked senior police assessments that the IRA was moving in the right direction but was still involved in criminality.
The Commission - its other members are ex-Metropolitan police officer John Grieve, ex CIA deputy director Dick Kerr and former Irish civil servant Joe Bronson - is also expected to state that loyalists paramilitaries are reducing, but have not halted, their illegal activities.
The report is the eighth compiled by the four man team and was specially commissioned by the two governments last October. The negative assessment of the IRA will give the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party added ammunition to continue to refuse re-entering power-sharing with Sinn Fein.
DUP MP Gregory Campbell reiterated the party stance today after his return from meetings with the Taoiseach, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Justice as part of a Commons Northern Ireland Select Committee investigation into organised crime.
He said it was apparent the three Irish ministers were "still living in the hope that there is going to be devolution in Northern Ireland which includes Sinn Fein in the foreseeable future."
Mr Campbell said: "I had to make it clear to them in three separate meetings that both they in their country, and we in ours, need to prepare for arrangements while we all ascertain the bona fides of of Sinn Fein.
"It is unfortunate that they still harbour hopes of 'restoring the institutions' even repeating the mantra that people voted for the Agreement eight years ago."
With little or no sign of that breakthrough immediately, attention is already turning towards the next report of the IMC which is due in April.
The two governments had hopes of restarting the devolved institutions by the spring, but the DUP and Ulster unionists have both given the governments proposals for an interim stage. It would involve the Stormont Assembly being recalled but executive functions remaining with the British government or appointed officials.
Mr Blair and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain may go with the option if it was seen as temporary.
PA