Agreement is expected to be reached this week to move the Northern talks to both Dublin and London for a 10-week intensive period of negotiations, according to the Taoiseach.
Mr Ahern said the parties to the negotiations currently under way at Castle Buildings in Stormont expected to decide today or tomorrow on a date to move venues.
They also wanted to begin the intensive period of discussions to "plan out where we go now rather than to drift on". He said the intensive discussions were a "calculated decision, not a risk, that we must take if we're to move on. In all negotiations and particularly in these sensitive negotiations the status quo is never good enough."
In an interview on the RTE radio This Week programme, Mr Ahern said the unionists had given agreement to such a move, not to him directly, but to the chairmen of the talks. In terms of location "Castle Buildings is not heaven" and the move would be "helpful for everybody", he said.
"It is my own feeling that if you were to get to a position ultimately where you would reach a stage of intensive negotiations, you would have to be in a location where you could do that."
He also believed it would be easier for discussions if the North-South structures were worked on in the "kind of co-ordination, co-operation, friendships and meaningful working relationships that Dublin and London have".
He said he had made it "absolutely clear" that the Irish Government would have to devolve powers "from our own institutions" to make the North-South arrangements work. If they could do this on the east-west discussions there was no reason why it could not be done in the same way for the North-South structures.
"We want to be accommodating, we're trying to find a solution," he said but stressed that they were "very firm in our understanding that in any solution" they were not going down the road again of isolating nationalists from the Government they looked to.
He did not believe the "constitutional issues" would actually increase the isolation of nationalists. "They don't, because we have to put it in terms of the comprehensive settlement," and in the context of consent.
"We believed that constitutional change from the British is also required and I made that absolutely clear in my discussions every time I meet Mr Trimble and when I meet Mr Blair."
He was asked if he accepted that it was difficult for republicans to hear a Taoiseach say that he would welcome David Trimble as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.
The Government was looking for equality and balance, he said. The Ulster Unionist Party was the largest party so whatever arrangement was in place it would be the head of that party who would be leader, providing that it was all part of an overall settlement.
"What we will not be asking Sinn Fein to do is to agree to an institutional assembly or any other body in the North in terms that that is the solution in its own right because that of course would be an internal solution," he said.
"I do believe that in some future time, and hopefully I'll be alive for it, that we would see another development towards a united Ireland. That is the aspiration that I would politically work for."
But he understood the realities of the current situation. So his imperative was to try and work for a solution to stop the killing and give people an opportunity to live in harmony and peace.