The DUP still does not expect to meet the proposed November deadline for restoring power-sharing government to Northern Ireland, despite yesterday's apparently "good meeting" between prime minister Tony Blair and the Rev Ian Paisley.
This became clear yesterday even as Dr Paisley allowed that "miracles happen" when asked if his opposition to a power-sharing deal with Sinn Féin might be dropped come the end of November.
"My position and the position of my party is very clear," Dr Paisley said after his Downing Street talks.
"No one can be in the government of Northern Ireland until they are absolutely clear of terrorism and criminality, and that has been our policy and we have been criticised for sticking to it, and we haven't changed."
Asked if he might change by the autumn deadline expected to be unveiled by Mr Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in Armagh tomorrow, Dr Paisley replied: "Miracles happen."
His party would be at the recalled Assembly on May 15th, he said, but not to put "Sinn Féin-IRA" into the Executive: "There will be no Executive as far as we are concerned until that main principle is accepted."
Of the prospect for a miracle, the DUP leader said: "Miracles happen, and if they have a miracle it could happen. I do not know the mind of the IRA. I do not know the pressures that are on the IRA. I do not know how they are thinking But I have been very clear in my statements, unequivocal."
London and Dublin will hope to detect just sufficient equivocation in these comments to sustain them through what promises to be an extremely difficult first phase of the proposed transitional Assembly, whose terms of reference will be changed by emergency British legislation, to be introduced shortly after Easter.
However, usually reliable DUP sources yesterday told The Irish Times that Dr Paisley had not been misrepresented following a BBC radio interview at the weekend, when he was reported to have dismissed hopes of a power-sharing Executive by November as "nonsense".
Some members of the party's "modernising wing" had taken Dr Paisley's comments to be a reference to the first proposed vote in the Assembly on restoring power-sharing, expected to take place at the end of June.
However the sources yesterday confirmed that in his Sunday Sequence interview, Dr Paisley had been making the case for maintaining the Assembly come November, when he said: "I think we are not going to have an Executive but why do they not turn the Assembly into a body that has power to consider important matters?"