ONE deadline was passed on the North last week and another set for two weeks' hence. The stalemate between Sinn Fein, which won't accept the necessity for decommissioning by the IRA, and the Ulster Unionist Party, which won't have Sinn Fein in government without it, continues. Even Bill Clinton, who is entertaining all parties in Washington next week, doesn't think he can knock heads together and get a solution.
Meanwhile, a new, state-of-the-art parliament at Stormont staffed by 140 civil servants sits waiting. The 108-seat assembly may be operating, and arguing, but since the executive hasn't been formed, the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, David Trimble and Seamus Mallon, can't name their cabinet, the ministries can't be doled out - three to the unionists, three to the SDLP and two each for the DUP and Sinn Fein - and the administration in waiting can't administrate. The civil servants are in place, the advisers have been appointed, the technology is ready, the building has been refurbished. Indeed bureaucrats visiting from Dublin have been much impressed with the apparatus of government just waiting to govern.
The two leaders have had fully staffed private offices for several months but the departments continue to be under British control. Without an executive even the mechanism of shadow government can't operate in the pre-devolution stage.
Mallon's closest colleague in the SDLP, John Fee, outlined the state of readiness at a conference on North-South co-operation in Monaghan last weekend, but he warned that the intricate institutional arrangements could collapse very quickly if there was no agreement on decommissioning.
The optimists believe that with all this in train there is a momentum building and a certain inevitability that it will happen.