The Ulster Unionist Party leader, Mr David Trimble, has said the sanctions he is seeking on parties who breach the Belfast Agreement stop short of exclusion from the Northern Ireland Executive.
Stating the "nuclear option" of exclusion was already embraced in the agreement, Mr Trimble said in a speech last night that a mechanism to sanction parties who break a commitment to non-violence would only strengthen the pact.
In contrast to Sinn Féin, which says the sanctions issue is a "deal-breaker" in efforts to revive the power-sharing Executive ahead of elections in May, Mr Trimble said before his speech that sanctions were a "deal-maker".
After meeting the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, at Government Buildings yesterday afternoon, Mr Trimble told journalists that time was running very short for an agreement. He hoped there would be "significant developments" in the next week at the most.
As efforts intensify in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the agreement next month, Mr Ahern said decisions would be made next week when the Irish and British governments publish their joint position paper.
He hoped talks involving all the pro-agreement parties and the two governments could take place before Easter, probably in the second week of April.
Mr Trimble wanted the republican movement to state that its war was over and that IRA "will no longer be a private army". This should be made "absolutely clear" but in "whatever way" the movement chose.
He called for a decisive resumption of decommissioning, and said Sinn Féin should indicate that it would "support policing" and law, rather than subvert it.
Though sanctions are the major issue of disagreement, Mr Trimble said in his speech at Trinity College, Dublin, to the Irish Association for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations, that such a regime was in keeping with the spirit of the agreement.
"It is simply not true to say that the agreement contains no sanctions. The sanction is there and it is a stiff one. It is contained in Section 25 of the Strand One section of the agreement. The sanction is exclusion from office. So there is a sanction. The problem arises from the mechanism."
The "best way forward" was for the two sections of the community to work together in government. The adoption of a sanctions regime would provide insulation from short-term political pressures.
"The experience of working together in government was - given the depth of past bitterness - surprisingly positive. The reason the Assembly has fallen has nothing to do with bad internal dynamics. For all its complexities, the new Stormont worked reasonably well - not perfectly, but reasonably well - as did the North-South framework. We got the structures there right in 1998."
On the war in Iraq, Mr Trimble said the regime was in material breach of UN Resolution 1441 when military action began. The US had moved "slowly, deliberately and proportionately", he said. "If Resolution 1441 is right, ensuring compliance with it is also right."
Mr Trimble also raised the Republic's relations with the EU. "EU accession was about Ireland integrating with the wider world and while I understand the Irish desire to identify with France and Germany, does Ireland want to line up with Old Europe or New Europe? These are not questions for me to answer, merely to raise."