With the European elections looming on June 10th, Northern Ireland peace process politics would normally be set aside because politicians generally don't do deals when they are battling to win seats.
This time, however, as the parties and candidates publicly slug it out in typical bare-knuckle electoral fashion, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, behind the scenes, will continue their efforts to implement their road map to restore devolution.
The essence of this road map, first alluded to by the Taoiseach and prime minister in Dublin at the weekend, involves the Irish and British governments returning to the aborted Hillsborough peace process deal of last October in the hope that a fully reinstated Stormont administration can be restored by October.
In broad terms, there are five milestones on this map:
The governments would implement the remaining elements of last October's abandoned deal including providing an amnesty for IRA fugitives, delivering demilitarisation, and making a commitment to devolve justice and policing to the Northern executive;
In turn, the IRA would meet its part of the October deal: effectively going out of business, and backing this up with credible decommissioning;
The Independent Monitoring Commission, if such were the case, would confirm that the IRA was no longer involved in paramilitary activity;
Based on this confirmation, the DUP would for the first time negotiate directly with Sinn Féin to restore devolution;
All the institutions of the Belfast Agreement would be fully reactivated.
Dublin and London sources quickly acknowledge Mr Ahern's and Mr Blair's plan was "conceptual" at this stage. "Putting the theory behind the plan into practice will be difficult, and is what the next few months will be about," said one senior source.
At Stormont yesterday, the Northern Secretary, Mr Paul Murphy, and the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr O'Donoghue, put the public form of peace process politics into cold storage until after the European elections.
The governments in the meantime will continue their contacts with the other parties to test if they want to travel with this road map. This contact will be maintained during the election campaign, but based on commitments that they won't exploit these discussions for electoral advantage.
After the election the governments plan to hold another round of "hot house" proximity talks involving all the parties, possibly in London. These talks, it is hoped, will allow the governments to devise a potential blueprint for a deal, which would be enacted after the summer holidays in early autumn. A quiet summer would help the project.
For this to work some element of trust must develop between Sinn Féin and the DUP ahead of direct contact between the parties. Which is one of the main reasons why, in the turmoil of EU accession, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, travelled to Stormont on Thursday to hold confidential talks with the DUP.
The governments, while believing agreement is possible, are concerned that it would not suit either Sinn Féin or the DUP to strike a deal by October: rather that they would prefer to do business in October next year when, the parties hope, they respectively will have inflicted further damage on the SDLP and Ulster Unionists in next summer's expected Westminster elections.
Yet, while October this year is a very ambitious target date for a breakthrough it is not impossible.