Israel has promised a decision "within days" on whether to admit a group of 25 Irish pilgrims, who were roughly deported from Israel in October.
The Israeli ambassador in Dublin sent a cable to his Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem warning of the damage the affair was having on Israeli-Irish relations.
The Irish Times has learned that the Israeli Foreign Ministry strongly favours admitting the group, the Pilgrim House Community, from Castletown, Co Wexford, which, it acknowledges, poses absolutely no threat to public order here.
However, the Interior Ministry and the police have not yet given their assent.
The police may be somewhat embarrassed by the brusque manner in which they turned back the pilgrims - some of them children - at Haifa port in October.
The group was refused entry after arriving without the visas required for a planned lengthy visit to the Holy Land.
Since its deportation, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, and the Ambassador in Israel, Mr Brendan Scannell, have intervened on its behalf, providing assurances to the Israeli authorities that the pilgrims do not constitute any kind of threat.
Indeed, the entire affair appears to stem from a simple linguistic mix-up.
The Israeli authorities, worried by the prospect of extreme Christian cultists converging on the Holy Land in the run-up to the new millennium and provoking End of Days violence here, sought details from the Garda when the group first applied to visit.
The Garda, it is understood, described the Pilgrim House Community as "radical Christians" - by which they meant a Christian group outside the mainstream.
However, the Israelis understood "radical" to indicate dangerous and potentially violent, and even connected them to an extreme American cult known as the "Concerned Christians".
Accordingly, the Israeli authorities declined to issue visas for the group members. When they arrived on October 10th, despite having been refused visas, the Israeli authorities saw this as proof of their potentially dangerous nature and sent them home.
According to official Irish sources, the group wants to try again to enter Israel - to see the holy sites and to vindicate itself. Mr Scannell said last night Ireland had answered all the Israeli authorities' concerns, and had been promised a decision in the very near future.
In his cable, Israel's Ambassador to Dublin, Mr Mark Sofer, strongly recommended that the pilgrims be admitted, particularly in light of Mr Andrews's personal plea.
A refusal, Mr Sofer warned, "would definitely impact on our diplomatic relations and on Irish public opinion".
Foreign Ministry sources in Jerusalem said Israel was now "looking into the possibility of enabling the visit" and would take a decision within days.