As the politicians prepare to meet again in Belfast tomorrow, there are few signs of progress made during the "short pause for reflection" announced at Hillsborough 11 days ago.
That short pause for reflection was in recognition of the deadlock in the talks on decommissioning. Over a year after Good Friday 1998, decommissioning remains the constant, unresolved issue that threatens to derail the political process. Tomorrow the two governments and the North's political parties begin a series of meetings to try to address this issue once again. In between the apparently unbending positions of the UUP and Sinn Fein are the small and by now familiar areas in which the optimists see hope for compromise: The fact that the Hillsborough Declaration envisages that weapons will be put "beyond use" rather than "decommissioned" is seen, for example, as offering the potential for some imaginative gesture in relation to paramilitary weapons; the regular indications from the British government that new "demilitarisation" steps are being taken is seen as providing a context in which decommissioning might be easier; the fact that the putting of weapons "beyond use" is now being seen as part of a "day of reconciliation" also offers hope of allowing decommissioning to be seen as a gesture of reconciliation rather than surrender.
Postponed deadlines and fudges have allowed the peace process to appear to move slowly but steadily forward for the last 12 months, as the weapons issue was pushed further down the line. At some stage failure to reach agreement must surely be portrayed as nothing other than a crisis in the peace process.
However, Government sources point to a number of facts which they say give some grounds for optimism. In all the Sinn Fein rhetoric at gravesides and elsewhere over the past fortnight, there has been no outright rejection of the concepts envisaged in the Hillsborough Declaration. Others have interpreted Sinn Fein comments as a rejection, but Sinn Fein, they say, have avoided using the word.
Sinn Fein are always hard bargainers, these cautious optimists go on, and this is clearly the toughest issue for them. Yet they are still engaged, they will turn up determined to reach a deal, no matter how unlikely a deal may seem.
The governments cling to what they believe is the key fact: That David Trimble and Gerry Adams both want the agreement to work, the executive to be formed and the process to reach a new level of development.
But neither man is free to lead his troops wherever he pleases. For one year Mr Trimble has put forward the decommissioning issue as his bottom line, and told his party that he will not be party to an executive in which Sinn Fein is represented unless there is movement on decommissioning. It is widely accepted that he cannot back off from that position without almost certainly losing his party. As UUP honorary secretary Mr Jeffrey Donaldson said last week, Mr Trimble is "well aware that a credible start to IRA decommissioning must be made before Sinn Fein can join an executive".
Mr Adams is in a similar position on the other side of the argument. He cannot lead the republican movement where it will not go, and the IRA's unchanged position is that we can forget about any decommissioning in advance of the formation of the executive.
The Hillsborough Declaration came up with detailed proposals for how the formation of the executive and weapons decommissioning would be choreographed. It envisages that ministers would first be nominated to a "shadow executive". A month later there would be a "day of reconciliation" and a quantity of weaponry would be put "beyond use". Also "around that time" the executive would move from its shadow phase and take on substantive form with Sinn Fein ministers taking two executive seats.
Government sources were emphasising at the weekend that the talks which open tomorrow will spend much time re-examining the Hillsborough Declaration, and will open this formula up again for further refinement. Around lunchtime tomorrow this latest phase of negotiations will open with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, and the Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, hosting an intensive series of bilateral meetings with the pro-agreement parties. Their attention will be concentrated almost entirely on the UUP and Sinn Fein delegations, in an attempt to come up with some form of words describing a sequence of events that might allow both sides to say that their conditions have been met.
Once again the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, are expected to come to the talks.
There is no formal deadline for these talks, although a failure to agree by the end of April must mean the word crisis will replace the word deadlock. On such an intractable issue, it may not be until the talks are in genuine crisis that any breakthrough will come.