Some of the wiser peace process hands, on both the British and Irish sides, believe there is no quick fix to the current mess, writes Dr Steven King.
Could it be that the Northern Ireland Assembly will be permanently suspended as, some claim, Mohammed's coffin is between heaven and hell? Or can some deus ex machina be found that will see the institutions agreed on Good Friday 1998 restored to health to allow elections in May?
Much of the optimism generated or manufactured before Christmas has evaporated. Many have reconciled themselves, with varying degrees of pain, to the prospect of a long suspension. Depressingly, for many unionists, direct rule, even with a green tinge, is at least tolerable. It has been made more so by the better than expected (from a pro-Union viewpoint) census results.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985-98 gave the Irish Government a direct role in the North's affairs without it being required to give up its territorial claim. At least now, some say, the Republic is formally and unambiguously committed to the consent principle.
The latest suspension of the institutions is the product of the cumulative effect of the Florida gun-running, the Colombian adventure, the Castlereagh police station break-in and the espionage ring apparently operating at the heart of government. Unionists are where they love to be - on the high moral ground. They will not be shifted easily.
The experience of government with Sinn Féin was simply too traumatic for a quick fix to work.
It is worth recalling David Trimble was twice prevailed upon to take the huge risk of setting up an Executive on the basis of promises of a tangible break with the republican past. He was not told he would be expected to sustain it in the face of gun-running, spying and basic criminality.
On the third occasion the IRA did deliver two important acts of decommissioning but, as the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, put it in his seminal Belfast speech of October 17th, 2002, "it all came with another price". Too often the British government has had to offer sweeteners to the IRA to get more movement from them and at the same time offer unionists sweeteners to compensate them for the continuing activity of the IRA. The result: cynicism.
Unionists took comfort from Mr Blair's speech. At last, it seemed, he was prepared to insist that his definition of a ceasefire, and not the IRA's minimalist one, would be the price of Sinn Féin participation in government.
That definition, which includes all acts of violence and not just the murder of soldiers and policemen, was crucial in winning the referendum within unionism in May 1998. It is the fact that this definition was not enforced which has been largely responsible for the malaise of pro-Agreement unionism. Those who call for Mr Trimble to make a more positive, more emollient pitch for the Belfast Agreement ignore this simple fact.
The Prime Minister explicitly styled his message as a "big bang", a sharp break with the "peace-processing" of the past. Here was to be an end to the salami-slicing negotiating style of republicans.
Previously, the tiniest concession would be wrought out of them and hailed as a seismic shift, as if all the effort must have been worth something. The uncomfortable reality is that, although progress has been made, the fundamental character of the IRA as an active organisation has been allowed to persist.
David Lloyd George only succeeded in persuading Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith to put their names to the Treaty when he convinced them that no more concessions were available. Has Mr Blair learned this lesson and will he hold to his new line in the sand?
It is striking from most of the recent commentary that many assume the line has already been washed away and that an entirely traditional Sinn Féin/British government negotiation is going on again, characterised by all the old rules: hints of dramatic republican concessions down the line being traded for British concessions now.
If reports that Sinn Féin's official response to Mr Blair's speech is a 50-something page list of complaints and demands are true then it seems we might be back to the bad old way of doing things.
Take the issue of policing. We are told that the matter of Sinn Féin joining the Policing Board has, in effect, been resolved.
But the Prime Minister declared that "the concept of republicans on the Policing Board, of young republicans becoming police officers, while maintaining an active paramilitary organisation, outside of the law, only needs to be stated to be seen as an absurdity".
There is a growing belief that another concession - an election in May to a phantom Assembly - is under consideration.
While there are many in Northern Ireland who understandably are keen to see an election in May, at least as many are highly sceptical. Significantly, the sceptics are concentrated amongst the supporters of the moderate parties.
An election called above all at the behest of Gerry Adams, in the absence of convincing "acts of completion", would be seen as a further indication that those primarily responsible for the collapse of the institutions are once again being rewarded. Such a perception, if it takes hold, will destroy the popular moral basis for the Belfast Agreement irretrievably, irrespective of who were to win such an election in the two sectarian camps.
If an election is delayed, there will be an utterly predictable outcry. But just how vulnerable will a British Prime Minister be to criticism on this score while he remains the United States' one indispensable ally in the world, especially if Sinn Féin is seen to be in the vanguard of Irish popular hostility to US foreign policy?
What the process needs is time. Suspicion abounds. The leak of the Irish Government's background paper on the situation in Northern Ireland - which acknowledged the IRA is still very much in existence - has left a bad taste.
It is not that unionists lie awake at night worrying that the Department of Foreign Affairs thinks the UUP is "internally dysfunctional" - the party is obsessively democratic. What has been deeply destabilising is the unfortunate sense that the Department does not have, even in its private moments, a critical perspective on republicanism.
Some of the older and wiser peace process hands, on both the British and Irish sides, believe that the current mess is not amenable to a speedy resolution.
They may well be right. Preserving the fundamentals of the Belfast Agreement may well take some time to achieve.
Dr Steven King is political adviser to David Trimble