With just four days to go before Mr David Trimble's resignation as First Minister, there is no sign of the IRA move on decommissioning which would avert a full-blown crisis in the North's political process.
Nor will there be, according to the IRA. Last week a spokesman for that organisation told selected reporters that the issue "will not be resolved by unionist ultimatums or on British terms". In other words, they intend to do nothing before Mr Trimble's resignation takes effect. Nobody appears to believe that this position will change by the weekend.
It is close to seven years now since the first demands for IRA decommissioning were made by unionists and by the Northern secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, in 1994, in the immediate aftermath of the first IRA ceasefire. The apparently endless round of discussions and summits, statements and agreements since has failed to lead to the putting of even a token amount of weapons verifiably beyond use.
The Belfast Agreement, signed by all the Northern parties, including Sinn Fein, and endorsed by the people, envisaged that decommissioning would be completed by May 2000. It has not even begun.
In the interim, there has been enormous change across a broad agenda of issues important to nationalists and republicans.
Hundreds of IRA prisoners have been released from jails North and South, in many cases avoiding lengthy sentences and instead being freed to rejoin society.
Major police reform has passed into law, and an affirmative action recruitment process has begun to increase the number of Catholics joining.
British army patrolling has reduced substantially, and 40 per cent of military bases and installations have been closed or demolished, although some others have been expanded.
The power-sharing Executive has been established with Sinn Fein ministers in government.
For Sinn Fein and the IRA, these changes are not enough. The police reform falls short of what was proposed in the Patten report, itself a compromise between unionist and nationalist aspirations, they say. The security-force presence on the ground remains too high, they maintain. In addition, Mr Trimble is preventing Sinn Fein Ministers from participating fully in the new political institutions.
While there has been no movement on the decommissioning issue on a practical level, there has been at a rhetorical level.
There is no longer a demand for the handing in or surrender of weapons. Instead, the demand is that weapons be "put beyond use" by the paramilitaries themselves in a manner which can be witnessed and verified by independent inspectors. The most commonly discussed means of doing this is the permanent sealing of arms dumps with concrete.
The IRA's response has also changed from the initial statement immediately after the signing of the Belfast Agreement that "there will be no decommissioning by the IRA". Now the IRA says that there are circumstances in which it will initiate a decommissioning process.
However, these circumstances require meeting their full demands on police reform and demilitarisation, the issues on which the IRA claims the British government has reneged. Through fulfilling republican requirements on these issues, the British government can create a "context" in which decommissioning can take place, according to the IRA.
There has been a significant symbolic gesture, agreed in May 2000 and subsequently carried out by the IRA. Independent observers have inspected specific arms dumps three times and have verified that the weapons in them have not been used. These weapons are not technically "beyond use", although the inspectors have made it clear that their use will be detected and reported by them.
But now the lack of actual decommissioning is closing in on Mr Trimble and on the political process. Mr Trimble initially persuaded his party to enter talks with Sinn Fein before any decommissioning took place. He sold them the Belfast Agreement without a watertight IRA commitment to decommission.
He led them into the power-sharing Executive to sit with Sinn Fein Ministers while the IRA remained entirely intact. And, after the institutions were suspended in February, he persuaded his party to rejoin the Executive without any decommissioning.
Now his party has been damaged at the polls and seriously threatened for supremacy in the unionist community by the DUP. It appears that Mr Trimble has no room left for compromise and that the failure to resolve the decommissioning issue has finally caught up with the political process.