Inside Politics/Stephen Collins: It was ironic that as Bertie Ahern got plaudits at the European Council meeting in Brussels yesterday for a British-Irish initiative that could have a European dimension, he was getting a hard time much closer to home for his latest co-operative effort with Tony Blair to find some formula to make Northern Ireland work as a political entity.
With the eighth anniversary of the Belfast Agreement coming up, the Northern Assembly and its powersharing executive are still not functioning.
Apart from a brief honeymoon period, the Northern parties have proved incapable of working together in the kind of executive envisaged in the heady days of 1998.
Mr Ahern and Mr Blair were then each in their heady first year in office. The Belfast Agreement represented an enormous achievement that promised to write their names in history as the two men who had finally settled the age-old Irish question.
Now as Mr Blair enters the final year, possibly the final months, of his premiership and Mr Ahern faces a general election in a little over a year, there is something of a last throw of the dice about their latest effort to put the Assembly back in operation.
However, the failure to date to get the two tribes in the North to work together should not obscure the real achievements of the Belfast Agreement. It has facilitated the development of a harmonious relationship between Ireland and Britain and has broken down many of the barriers between North and South.
John Hume always spoke about the need to see the Northern problem as one element in a three-stranded relationship.
The paradox is that while the East-West and North-South strands have thrived as a result of the agreement, the strand involving the two communities in the North, which it was all designed to help, is still the one giving trouble.
At the European Council, the Taoiseach told the heads of government from other EU countries of how a deal between his Government and Tony Blair's had resulted in the elimination of roaming mobile-phone charges between Ireland and Britain. Initially the push to do something about the matter had come from the iniquity of roaming charges along the Border, an issue that was brought to the fore by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, himself a Border TD.
Pressure applied by Irish and British ministers working together persuaded the big two mobile companies, Vodafone and O2, to get rid of roaming charges not just for the island of Ireland but between Ireland and Britain. The Taoiseach used this as an example of how EU governments working together could apply pressure to big companies to eliminate roaming charges altogether.
While the Austrian presidency of the EU welcomed the Irish-British initiative to end roaming charges, the other heads of government were not prepared to go quite so far and instead they agreed to apply pressure to get reduced charges. Still, it was an example of how something that developed out of the Belfast Agreement could have an impact right across the EU.
The Taoiseach was in ebullient form discussing this issue after the meeting but his mood was not quite as jolly when it came to the latest initiative on the North to get the Assembly up and running again. However, what is clear is that the Irish and British governments are completely unified on the issue and Mr Ahern intends, if necessary, to stick by his alliance with Mr Blair in defiance of the Northern nationalist parties.
The attempt by Sinn Féin and the SDLP to get their retaliation in first and voice their objections in public to the plan being devised by the two Governments met with a cool response from Mr Ahern.
He stressed that he would listen to them but that he was not going to be deflected from his determination to launch his initiative with Mr Blair.
A month ago, objections by the nationalist parties to the idea of a "shadow" Assembly being proposed by the British caused Mr Ahern to postpone the plan. However, he emphasised yesterday that there was no question of a "shadow" Assembly. It would be a real body with a specific time frame in which to either agree on the establishment of an executive or collapse.
When Mr Ahern and Mr Blair met in Farmleigh back in January they promised action by the summer and that is what is going to happen.
For better or worse, they intend to launch their initiative by Easter, with the Assembly meeting for six weeks before the summer and then resuming its deliberations in the autumn.
The expectation on the Irish side is that Sinn Féin and the SDLP will go into the Assembly, despite their reservations.
Whether the DUP will do the same is not at all clear. The party wanted an Assembly to put forward its policies as well as exercising some sort of scrutiny over the British ministers currently charged with running the North, but it is strongly opposed to a time limit on its existence.
The governments are hoping that all the parties will at least get involved. Even if that happens, there is no guarantee that they will agree to share power by the end of the year, but at least a decision one way or the other would clear up the uncertainty once and for all.
If the Northern parties don't want to share power, the two governments can find other ways to deal with the North as just one of the issues of common concern.
The positive side of the latest row is that is has demonstrated that the squabbling Northern parties are no longer capable of disrupting the good relationship between the governments of Ireland and Britain.