Failure to reach a deal points to the renegotiation of the Belfast Agreement, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
Are we witnessing the death throes of the Belfast Agreement?
On its symbolic fifth anniversary, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, will admit nothing of the sort. Even if forced to "park" their negotiation with the IRA, they wish it to be seen as a work in progress. Both seem splendidly oblivious to the very real danger that this will be only-too-readily believed on both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland.
The two premiers will continue to insist the Belfast Agreement remains the only show in town. Mr Blair, in particular, has reason to believe it and to will it so. The agreement, after all, is his government's chosen template for Middle East peace and conflict resolution around the globe. Nor is this some piece of New Labour rhetoric or Downing Street "spin". Mr Blair means it.
That said, Mr Blair presumably also meant it last October when he told Irish republicans they faced "a fork in the road" and a moment of choice - no more "inch-by-inch negotiation" but "big steps" and "acts of completion" all round.
The very thing republicans thought had given them leverage in the past, the threat of violence, Mr Blair declared counter-productive, serving only to justify the unionist "rejectionists" routinely condemned by Sinn Féin.
Many unionists had difficulty believing Mr Blair back then. The IRA plainly has difficulty believing him still. For by his and Mr Ahern's own account to date, the IRA has failed to take Mr Blair at his word - preferring instead to have Sinn Féin negotiate to a republican agenda while declining (at least in terms acceptable to London and Dublin) to rule itself out of business as an active paramilitary force.
Maybe the Provisionals are planning a spectacular climbdown even now, waiting merely to observe the celebration of the Easter Rising before bending to the will of the British and Irish governments.
It must be said it would not be like them, nor typical of Sinn Féin's political leadership to set the scene for so public a humiliation. Yet if the Provisionals do not bend, it must also be said that the Blair/Ahern initiative will have failed.
At that moment of truth, it will be for the Prime Minister and Taoiseach to decide whether David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists - and, quite possibly, Mark Durkan's SDLP - should be expected to pay the price for that failure in an Assembly election.
If the Taoiseach is to be our guide then the elections to a new Stormont Assembly will go ahead as planned on May 29th - with or without the required IRA "act of completion" necessary to secure an Ulster Unionist commitment to resume power-sharing government thereafter.
It might be thought part of the "greening" of Northern Ireland that Mr Ahern - and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen - frequently pronounce judgment on a matter which actually remains for the British government to decide. In any event, Mr Blair is known to be extremely reluctant to postpone the election a second time, and would hardly wish to do so in face of strong Irish opposition.
Indeed the notion has grown in recent days that because Mr Ahern has been so strong in rejecting the various draft IRA statements about its future, Mr Blair would not wish to disappoint him on the question of the election.
But as Mr Ahern and Mr Blair consider the prospects for an increasingly tainted diplomacy, both men might stand back and ask themselves why there should be an election at all; whether it can possibly serve their declared purpose or might, more likely, prove ruinous to the political project to which they have both devoted such extraordinary time and effort.
Indeed the urgency with which Mr Trimble would have these questions addressed was underlined by the Taoiseach's comments reported in this newspaper yesterday. Contemplating a final throw of the dice, Mr Ahern said: "If at this stage I felt there was no more point we would just have to see what would happen at the other side of the election."
If this throwaway line carried more than a hint of desperation, it certainly offered no strategy for saving the agreement. Moreover, with the Rev Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams urging him on, Mr Ahern really has little need to wait and see what emerges from an election. Both governments know the likely outcome only too well. They, after all, have written the script.
Since the turn of the year some of us have wondered whether - even with satisfactory words and actions from the IRA - the timetable dictated by the need for fresh Assembly elections would prove impossibly tight for Mr Trimble.
The reasoning was simple. Given the background to the suspension of the Assembly - from the association with FARC terrorists, through the break-in at the Castlereagh police complex, to the alleged IRA spy ring at the heart of British government - the unionist electorate might want time to test any "acts of completion" deal.
As the timetable slipped month after month, it seemed less likely that Mr Trimble could risk trying to "sell" such a deal in the teeth of an election campaign in which he would, of necessity, have to urge unionist voters to trust republican intentions. Downing Street, however, was bolstered by the contrary conviction - that the UUP Assembly members knew their best electoral chance against the DUP lay in the successful restoration of devolution.
As they contemplate failure at this point, the British are suggesting Mr Trimble still has a decent tale to tell, and that "no deal might be better than a bad one." This at least is true. But "no deal" spells potential electoral disaster for Mr Trimble, and the Ulster Unionist leader knows it. Indeed such is the appalling vista opening before Mr Trimble that some of his friends suggest he should now consider his position and refuse to lead his party into an election in such conditions.
For no deal means no successful devolution, no inclusive government, no transparent decommissioning, no guaranteed republican commitment to exclusively peaceful means, no declared end to the IRA's war - five years after the Ulster Unionist leader (backed by Mr Blair's referendum pledges) promised to deliver on all fronts.
No deal means, to put it crudely, that Dr Paisley's DUP - like Mr Trimble's internal tormentors, Jeffrey Donaldson and David Burnside - can credibly present itself to the unionist electorate as having been proved right.
British sources privately accept that an anti-Agreement unionist majority is the likely outcome of an election held in such circumstances. No deal now, therefore, points - not to the rescue of the Belfast Agreement - but to its renegotiation.
For if, as is claimed, the democratic imperative drives Mr Blair and Mr Ahern toward an election in any event, the same imperative surely will oblige them to accept its outcome.