Unionists would regard any attempt by the Government to push for joint authority over the North as a threat to the Belfast Agreement, writes Frank Millar
What on earth is Dublin's game plan? With varying degrees of exasperation and disbelief, that question has been asked aloud over the past week as the clock ticked remorselessly to last night's midnight hour and the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Asked inside Number 10 and the Northern Ireland Office for sure - but also within the higher echelons of the SDLP.
Faced with alleged IRA espionage at the heart of the NIO, the Dublin Government at first appeared in denial.
This, as one British source put it, seemed entirely "par for the course". Some months back after all - in what would once have been considered an amazing breach of protocol - the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, had flatly contradicted the then acting Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and asserted there was no evidence linking the Provisional IRA to the St Patrick's Day raid on the Castlereagh police complex.
So in the aftermath of the more recent bungled police raid on Sinn Féin's Stormont officeLondon was unsurprised to hear some Dublin spokesmen sounding-off as if this was the only issue.
No matter that a person had been charged with possession of the names and addresses of every prison officer in Northern Ireland.
No matter either Dr John Reid's shocked (and, we can imagine, reluctant) confirmation that the alleged IRA spy ring had gone beyond gathering political intelligence and breached what he termed "national security".
As recently as last Tuesday some Irish officials were still muttering about "dark forces" within the British security system, asking for the evidence, suggesting that maybe a PSNI Special Branch not yet reconciled to the Patten policing reforms had been engaged in dirty tricks.
By Wednesday evening - well in advance of his meeting with Prime Minister Blair at Downing Street - it became clear that, whatever about anybody else in the Irish system, the Taoiseach at least had grasped the gravity of the situation. Even before his plane touched down officials signalled his acceptance that suspension was inevitable. The relative dispatch with which he and Mr Blair dealt with the business in hand confirmed the two governments moving smartly into next steps management mode.
Yet, amazingly, we had been told Mr Ahern's preferred next step was a fresh and immediate election to the Stormont Assembly.
True, by the end of his discussions with Mr Blair the Taoiseach had converged on the SDLP's suggestion that the elections should proceed as scheduled on May 1st next year, if not before.
However, even that appeared a compromise, and Mr Ahern has since made it clear he would be against any delay beyond that point.
On the face of it Mr Ahern is at one with the SDLP leader, Mr Mark Durkan. But everyone knows the SDLP leadership is privately aghast at the idea of a headlong rush into elections until the issues which sparked yesterday's suspension have been resolved.
Asked why he thought Mr Ahern had been pressing the case for immediate elections, one senior SDLP figure confided: "I haven't a clue. It's crazy. An election in these circumstances? Sure we'd be annihilated."
In Whitehall, too, there was - is - similar incredulity at Mr Ahern's enthusiasm for an election which only Sinn Féin and the DUP appear to want. "I just don't get it," said one British insider: "We punish Sinn Féin by having an election in which they shaft the SDLP?" Others put their doubts more delicately, questioning the wisdom of an early poll which might strengthen Sinn Féin and the DUP and so consolidate the present stalemate. Within Ulster Unionist and some British circles, of course, the suspicion has been growing for some time that Dublin has written off Mr David Trimble and might now actually welcome a DUP ascendency, with Dr Paisley's deputy, Mr Peter Robinson, somehow emerging as the better man to do a deal and make it stick.
Mr Robinson is hardly discouraging such speculation. The timing of his decision to share a studio with Sinn Féin's Mr Martin McGuinness on Thursday night has intrigued many.
In an interview for this newspaper last week he suggested that an election would re-cast the political representation at Stormont in a way which would be more satisfactory for nationalists as well as unionists. And he seems to accept that any deal resulting from a re-negotiation of the Belfast Agreement would have to be acceptable to a majority in both communities. Sir Reg Empey was contemptuous yesterday of the notion that the DUP might do next year what they declined to do in the negotiations preceding the Good Friday accord.
However, at least some senior Irish diplomats are persuaded Mr Robinson is a man with whom they could do business. And the suspicion that Dublin might be encouraging or be even simply sanguine about the prospects for the erosion of the centre and the electoral triumph of the extremes is already starting to poison relations with the Ulster Unionists.
Mr Trimble, meanwhile, has been pointing to a more pressing danger and he departed Dublin on Friday having left the Taoiseach in no doubt that the prospects for salvaging the Belfast Agreement as the template for a political solution in Northern Ireland will rest heavily on the caution with which London and Dublin handle the period of suspension. The UUP leader understands Dublin sensitivity about last night's exercise of British sovereignty - all the more acute since Dublin gaveup its own territorial claim to the North as part of the agreement.
However, he knows, too, the conclusion the unionist electorate will draw if nationalist Ireland's response to this crisis is not to censure republicans but instead to demand an increased role for Dublin in the government of Northern Ireland.
As one of his closest advisers put it last night: "If Dublin wants to push for joint authority that's a matter for them, although I don't believe they'll get it.
But if as they say, and I believe them, they want to save the agreement then they'll simply have to back off."