2006, said to be a "make-or-break" year for the North, hasn't got off to a good start with doubts about OTRs and DUP unwillingness to share power with republicans, writes Dan Keenan
When Peter Hain told MPs in the Commons yesterday that "the endgame in conflict transformation is often the hardest point", he wasn't joking.
That admission came at the end of a five-page climbdown on his government's Bill to allow the free return of those suspected of terrorist offences.
On-the-runs, like the issues of republican support for policing and unionist commitment to powersharing in an inclusive executive, remain pressing questions without obvious answers.
The British and Irish governments have publicly and repeatedly set themselves to the task of whatever it takes to restore the institutions of the Belfast Agreement before 2007. Otherwise, there will be no elections to the assembly next year as scheduled.
To achieve that they must bring about not one, but two significant policy changes. They must convert Sinn Féin to a whole-hearted public endorsement of the new policing dispensation. They must also convince the DUP, and its highly sceptical electorate, that sitting alongside Martin McGuinness and his Sinn Féin colleagues around the executive table at Parliament Buildings is the way to security and progress.
If they fail, both London and Dublin admit the future is uncertain to put it mildly. "Who knows what might happen in 2007?" Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern wondered aloud in Belfast on Tuesday. He may well ask. If the scale of the governments' task was already substantial, it was larger by lunchtime yesterday.
The withdrawal of the on-the-runs Bill was forced on the British by the vociferous opposition of all the Northern MPs who take their seats in the Commons, and more lately by the five Sinn Féin MPs who don't.
Add to that the combined weight of the opposition, some prominent Labour backbenchers, including Mr Hain's predecessor, Paul Murphy, a majority of the House of Lords, victims' groups, the Human Rights Commission in Belfast, the PSNI officers' representative body, as well as a hostile Belfast Telegraph opinion poll, and you have quite a lobby.
Mr Hain had already raised the ire of the very people he is trying to cajole into agreeing to a powersharing deal.
His threat to put an as-yet undeclared time limit on the payment of salaries and allowances to assembly members who "do nothing" succeeded in stoking up a public outcry from the parties, to say nothing of their heightened private fears.
Mr Hain ought to concede such a remark was at least a touch unfair.
There is not one MLA who does not want to sit in Stormont as a legislator. They cannot because of the suspension order signed by Mr Hain's predecessor - a move they fought against.
Further, a host of constituency clinics and staff dealing with constituents' problems would be lost overnight if the Northern Ireland Office pulled the plug.
More importantly though, were Mr Hain to follow through with his threat, he would at a stroke abolish the carefully constructed political class necessary for devolution and powersharing to succeed.
Dermot Ahern, asked for his view on the issue on Tuesday, could have dodged the issue easily - but didn't.
Instead, he wondered rhetorically what abuse he would have to take were he to draw his salary if the Dáil did not sit for more than a year.
Mr Hain's broadbrush approach may indeed be unfair, but who said politics was fair?
He is thought to conclude that a time-limited approach to the assembly's existence and its members' salaries is required both by public opinion and by cold political reality. There is not much room for fairness there.
This year, as both governments stress, is a make-or-break year and it is not off to a good start.
Despite any sense of momentum caused by talk of "significant meetings" between both governments, talk of fresh involvement by the Taoiseach and prime minister Tony Blair, and the timetabling of more talks with the parties, there is little new optimism.
The enduring problems of republican support for policing and DUP backing for a powersharing executive are now supplemented by the question of what to do next about OTRs, amid a worsening atmosphere following the salary threat.
For the moment, the British government isn't answering the OTR question, even assuming that it knows the answer.
"We will not rush to conclusions," Mr Hain said yesterday. "I will take stock in the autumn."
In the meantime the DUP's Peter Robinson continues to hold up his idea of an assembly without a d'Hondt-style executive, leaving the leading unionist party and the British government at odds, not just on the means of achieving progress but also on the desired outcome.
Sinn Féin continues to press the two governments to "live up to their commitments" to implement the Belfast Agreement and in some way force the hand of the DUP on powersharing.
The two governments, sources say, will not allow the OTRs issue to block the drive for progress.
They look to the next IMC report, expected within three weeks or so, and to some measure of political progress on the back of that.
The Irish Government sees itself as having honoured any commitment to republicans to address the OTR question and free of any blame for the demise of Mr Hain's Bill.
In London, too, the issue will sit on the backburner while the government there gets on with what it sees as the main priority - devolution by year's end.