The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, and the Northern Secretary, Dr John Reid, are expected to meet this week to discuss the Ulster Unionist Party's threat to collapse the Northern Executive.
The Ulster Unionist Council agreed on Saturday that it would not participate in meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council "in view of the failure of Sinn Fein/IRA to honour their commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means".
Dr Reid will also embark on a round of meetings with the leaders of the Northern parties to determine if there is any means of avoiding the next sanction envisaged by the UUC - the withdrawal of UUP minister from the Executive and Assembly by January 18th if the IRA does not disarm and disband. One of his first meetings will be with the party leader, Mr David Trimble.
A spokesman for Mr Cowen said that the two ministers would meet this week to try to chart a way out of the political crisis. "The two governments are the guardians of the agreement and this is another challenge to the agreement," he added.
Dr Reid warned that Northern society would suffer if the political process was allowed to falter. "The Belfast Agreement has delivered real benefits for the people of Northern Ireland and the government remains fully committed to the way forward it presents."
Dr Reid said he understood that unionists needed assurance that republicans were committed to peace and democracy. But nationalists equally needed to be assured that unionists were committed to power-sharing.
London and Dublin are convinced that the IRA will not respond to the Ulster Unionist ultimatum by January 18th, and that Dr Reid will be forced to again suspend the Executive and Assembly, thereafter calling Assembly elections for March or April.
While there will be a series of talks in the weeks ahead, the two governments also fear that there is little chance of a resolution to the current difficulties until after the election. They suspect that the Ulster Unionist Party would prefer to campaign in the election outside the Executive so that its unified, hardline stance might give it a better chance of winning more seats than the DUP.
The motion agreed by the Yes and No wings of Ulster Unionism at the council on Saturday also stipulates that UUP ministers will not attend North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC) meetings involving Sinn Féin ministers.
One of the first potential crisis points will arrive in mid to late October when Sinn Féin Health Minister Ms Bairbre de Brún is due to attend an NSMC meeting in the South.
Mr Trimble said yesterday it was perfectly possible that the IRA could fully decommission and disband by the January deadline.
He said a method of disbanding would be for IRA members to join Sinn Féin, and said Mr Adams should have been preparing the IRA for the "inevitable".
"If he has, there isn't a problem. If he hasn't, obviously there's a problem. This process cannot be sustained as things stand at the moment," Mr Trimble told BBC's On the Record programme.
The SDLP leader and Deputy First Minister, Mr Mark Durkan, said he would not accept any UUP attempts to undermine the Belfast Agreement. He denounced the proposal to withdraw from the Policing Board if there were further "unnecessary" changes to policing legislation.
"The SDLP will not tolerate that. We took our seats on the Policing Board to uphold the implementation of Patten. I want to make sure that the British government are under no illusions as to the fact that they made commitments to change the policing legislation, commitments they made to the SDLP and the Irish Government last year," said Mr Durkan.
Former UUP MLA Mr Peter Weir, now a member of the DUP, said Saturday's Ulster Unionist Council had let Mr Trimble off the hook by not ditching him as leader. "In throwing away their last chance to remove him ahead of the election they backed the chief architect of the agreement against the interests of unionism."
Alliance leader Mr David Ford said Mr Trimble had "put on the political straitjacket handed to him by the anti-agreement faction in the UUP".
