The Northern parties were edging closer to final agreement on North-South bodies at Stormont last night, as the last remaining difference over the status and composition of a cross-Border body on tourism was overcome.
There will be six officially designated implementation bodies with a North-South responsibility for specific matters. These include the three proposed all along by the Ulster Unionists - inland waterways, aquaculture and marine matters, and food safety.
The other three are trade and business development, European programmes and languages (Irish and Ulster-Scots).
The SDLP had reportedly argued for a body on strategic transport planning but the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, argued forcefully for it to drop this in favour of the language-promotion body, as a concession to Sinn Fein. The Ulster Unionists were also said to favour a languages body, which would be less difficult to sell to their supporters than a body with more overt economic implications.
For some time a fudge was sought on European programmes. The basis for this compromise proposal was that EU peace funds would run their course until the end of next year when they are due to expire.
An implementation body would begin operating at that stage, applying for a new six-year range of funding programmes. This was keenly promoted by the SDLP whose back-up team includes persons with considerable expertise in European matters. However it did not secure the agreement of the unionists in the last analysis.
The focus then switched to tourism on a proposal that an all-Ireland private company dealing with policy co-operation be set up instead of an official implementation body. This would allow unionists to claim they had kept the number of such bodies to six while nationalists could argue with equal plausibility that the tourism body would be the most effective cross-Border institution of the lot because it would be untrammelled by state bureaucracy.
This proposal was said to have greater appeal for the unionists because in strict legal terms it would not be a cross-Border implementation body as outlined in the Belfast Agreement.
It is understood negotiations became quite heated on this topic with Mr Seamus Mallon adopting a direct and robust stance. Even as the differences narrowed, unionists were extremely concerned that it should not be possible for nationalists to present this as a seventh cross-Border body.
All day the official line put forward by the UUP was that agreement was "tantalisingly close". This was greeted with open scepticism by Sinn Fein which consistently questioned the good faith of unionist negotiators.
SDLP sources were also downbeat until late afternoon but their mood picked up considerably in the early evening. As one SDLP insider put it: "For the first time in history, we have all the cards on the table and all the unionists in the building."
There was also agreement last night on 10 executive ministries instead of the current six in Northern Ireland. Details of this were still being worked on at a very late stage. Sources said there would be two departments of education instead of the current one. The Department of the Environment would be divided in two, one for environmental planning, the second having a watchdog role. Other departments on the list included four existing ones - finance, economic development, health and agriculture, and two new departments. One of these would deal with culture, leisure, arts and possibly tourism, the other probably with housing and social inclusion.
A separate department of equality would have been seen by many as a concession to Sinn Fein but the indications were that this would be the responsibility of the so-called "department of the centre", under the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. The possibility such a department would have gone to the DUP may also have been a consideration.