In the North: Northern Secretary Peter Hain has followed up on the Taoiseach's sharp warning to the North's political parties on Friday by yesterday insisting that the political process had reached "crunch time" for a deal to restore devolution.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British prime minister Tony Blair remain primed to visit Northern Ireland in the next two weeks to unveil their plan to reinstate the Assembly in May and then in the late autumn restore the Executive.
The DUP has been calling for a phased return of devolution that would only be fully functioning when it was satisfied provisional republicanism had disavowed paramilitarism and criminality.
Sinn Féin has been demanding the immediate restoration of the Assembly and Executive.
Mr Hain repeated the hope of Mr Ahern and Mr Blair that their plan will be viewed by the DUP and Sinn Féin, as well as by the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party, as a reasonable compromise between the opposing positions.
"We are planning - and we will be announcing this in the next few weeks - to bridge the gap between the unionists on the one hand, who want to go into a shadow assembly, and the nationalists and republicans on the other, who don't want to do that," he said yesterday.
He again warned that if the plan failed, the Assembly would be dissolved and Assembly salaries ended. "People have to make their minds up. It is a crunch time," he told BBC1's Politics Programme yesterday.
And in comments similar to remarks by the Taoiseach on Friday that Northern politicians should do the job they were paid to do, he added: "This Assembly has been in existence for nearly four years. They have all been paid not to do their job.
"It's cost over £80 million. We can't continue like this. Everybody agrees with that. This plan will provide that bridge between the two positions. Nobody will be able to avoid taking a decision. That would be the choice that confronts them."
The DUP's Peter Robinson has indicated his party's willingness to test the proposals while insisting that if the DUP is not satisfied about Sinn Féin and the IRA's bona fides in late autumn, when the governments hope to have a fully functioning Assembly and Executive up and running, it would not go into government with Sinn Féin.
In Dublin on Saturday, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said his party would not support any proposal that was a repackaging of an earlier idea to restore the Assembly in "shadow" form. "The governments need to be coming forward with propositions which are about implementing the Good Friday agreement and then endeavouring to get the DUP on board," he said. He added however, that "Sinn Féin will look at whatever proposals the governments produce, and is in daily contact with them".
