President Bush's special adviser on Northern Ireland, Richard Haass, is expected to announce his resignation next week.
Mr Haass is said to have accepted the presidency of the Council on Foreign Relations, a high-powered group of business, union and political leaders that advises the government on foreign relations.
A Council on Foreign Relations spokeswoman yesterday declined to say if Mr Haass would be taking up the post but said that an announcement would be made next Monday. However, a well-placed source in the council said it was "very likely" that Mr Haass would be named as the new president of the council.
Mr Haass will succeed Mr Leslie H. Gelb as president of the council. Mr Gelb, a former State and Defence Department official, and previously a New York Times reporter, will leave the job in June.
One prominent Irish American advocate claimed Mr Haass wanted to get out of the Northern Ireland position because he did not feel it was earning the attention of the Bush administration.
Mr Haass served on the National Security Council under the first administration before taking a post in the Brookings Institute, a Washington-based foreign policy think-tank.
Meanwhile in Dublin, the former SDLP minister, Dr Sean Farren, said continuing operation of the IRA and other paramilitary groupings is at the heart of the political crisis in Northern Ireland.
In a blunt speech ahead of talks in Stormont tomorrow that will discuss how to end paramilitarism Dr Farren insisted that there could be no halfway house between politics and paramilitarism.
The achievement of an exclusively peaceful and democratic society was still far from realisation, he said in a debate on Irish unity in the Dublin Institute of Technology last night.
"Paramilitaries continue to operate. They have rearmed, they have continued with surveillance and spying activities, they have been involved in murder and, as the loyalist paramilitaries demonstrate daily, they have been engaged in the intimidation of their own and of their neighbouring communities," he said.
"There can be no compromise between an exclusively democratic and peaceful society and the persistence of paramilitary activ- ity. Private armies have no place in such a society, and five years after the Good Friday agreement was signed it is the failure to make significant progress towards this objective that lies at the heart of the current crisis.
"Failure to achieve real and significant progress on an end to paramilitarism will irreparably damage the Good Friday agreement and with it the cause of Irish unity," Dr Farren said.
Meanwhile, the DUP leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, has rounded on the Ulster Unionist Party after a senior David Trimble aide, Mr David McNarry, suggested the May elections should be postponed.
"The UUP are running scared of the electorate. They will do all in their power to make sure that the unionist people of Northern Ireland do not have a chance to pass their verdict on the misrule of the UUP," Dr Paisley said last night.
In advance of the round-table talks, which Mr Trimble and the DUP will boycott, Dr Paisley told his North Antrim constituency association that there was "absolutely no prospect of Sinn Féin-IRA moving from terrorism to democracy".