Last week, British prime minister Tony Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern set a deadline of November 24th for the parties in Northern Ireland to agree to share power, writes David Adams.
Failing that, the Assembly will close and the two sovereign governments will work together to implement the Belfast Agreement.
It would appear, then, that it is almost solely for the DUP to decide on where things go from here. Come November, they have a tough but straightforward choice to make: they either go into an executive with Sinn Féin or cede de facto joint authority over Northern Ireland - at least on a macro level - to the British and Irish governments.
Except, that line of reasoning does not take account of some harsh realities. It assumes that Sinn Féin is willing to give allegiance to a Northern Ireland executive, when no such easy assumption can be made. In fact, all evidence points to the polar opposite being the case.
No matter the positive-sounding rhetoric or attempts to shift blame, on every occasion to date republican actions or inaction have caused the collapse of a working executive, or proved an insurmountable barrier to reinstatement.
At every turn, republicans have shown that their primary interest is in ensuring perpetual political and social instability reigns in Northern Ireland, rather than the opposite.
Whether it was raising tensions and organising street disturbances around parading, flatly refusing to make good on promises to decommission, stealing files from police headquarters at Castlereagh, importing arms from the US, nefarious adventures in Colombia or running a spy-ring at Stormont.
In that way, they ended David Trimble's political career and made certain that support for the Belfast Agreement among moderate unionists all but evaporated.
Against all expectations, in December 2004 Sinn Féin and the DUP came close to reaching agreement on restoring the institutions. As though to ensure that if any agreement were reached it could not possibly last and, as well, that more progressive elements in the DUP were fatally undermined, within days of talks ending the IRA carried out the Northern Bank robbery. Hardly the actions of people intent on restoring a power-sharing administration.
The premiers made no mention last week of what role the seven powerful new "super councils" due to replace Northern Ireland's existing 26 councils will play.
However, if the assembly does close, it will be for these super councils to make up the democratic shortfall. In this column on June 11th, 2004, with the then ongoing Review of Public Administration in Northern Ireland certain to recommend a smaller number of more powerful councils, I signalled the dangers to unionism this posed in the continued absence of a working assembly.
I wrote: "In the absence of a working assembly at Stormont the centre - or rather, centres - of political gravity, such as they are, will lie with the new councils.
"And in that situation places like Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Armagh . . . will be seeking to form co-operative cross-Border relationships on issues of mutual concern and benefit with their counterparts in Southern councils.
"Formal cross-Border co-operation will begin taking place on issues like planning, health, education, commerce, tourism, the environment, waste disposal and a whole range of other things that we can't possibly foresee.
"Perhaps the current Review of Public Administration, given the conclusions it is bound to reach and the recommendations that will surely follow, is the Plan B (in case of collapse of the Belfast Agreement) that the two governments always denied existed."
Of all the political parties in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin is the only one to have enthusiastically endorsed the setting-up of these seven super councils.
And little wonder, from a republican perspective Plan B, now fully unfolded, looks infinitely more attractive than Plan A (the Belfast Agreement) ever could. In the absence of an assembly, Sinn Féin is now virtually guaranteed control of what will amount to three or four semi-autonomous, border fiefdoms.
The overall effect of this will be to "Balkan-ise" Northern Ireland.
In truth, even without the proposed new councils, it is clear republicans never intended that the internal arrangements of the Belfast Agreement would be allowed to operate successfully. The reason for that is quite simple. The prospects for achieving a united Ireland would virtually disappear in a politically settled, dual-citizenship Northern Ireland, as laid out in the Belfast Agreement.
How irrational, then, it is to assume that they are going operate an assembly now - particularly when an attractive alternative is on offer? Come November 24th, all Sinn Féin will concern itself with is ensuring the DUP is blamed for the inevitable failure.
After managing to lay so much blame on the avowedly pro-agreement David Trimble, they shouldn't find that too difficult.