Some senior pro-Agreement unionists are privately pressing the British and Irish governments to postpone fresh elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly for up to a year. This emerged last night along with outline details of an alternative plan which, they suggest, could lead to the speedy restoration of the suspended Assembly and power-sharing Executive.
The plan - believed to have been developed independently of the Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble - would require London and Dublin to create "a new level playing field" by defining the rules for the return of devolution and taking on new powers to exclude any party subsequently deemed to be in breach of the commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means.
The Irish Times understands the plan, which at first glance looks like a re-run of Mr Trimble's own previous demands for effective "exclusion mechanisms", is rooted in two key assumptions. First, that the time-frame for a conclusion to the present negotiations and the scheduled May 1st election date would not be sufficient to allow any agreement between republicans and the British government on "acts of completion" to gain sufficient credibility with the unionist electorate; and secondly, that the IRA will not in any event deliver Mr Tony Blair's requested "big steps" toward the cessation of all paramilitary activity until it sees the balance of unionist forces in the Assembly after the election.
In such circumstances, these pro-Agreement unionists argue that Mr Blair is almost certainly facing a choice between the continuation of direct rule or elections, eagerly sought by Sinn Féin and the DUP, which will provide no guarantee that the institutions of government can be reinstated in light of pre-election promises by the DUP and others to force a renegotiation of the Belfast Agreement.
Confirming this assessment last night, one senior Ulster Unionist source explained that any decision to resume power-sharing and postpone the elections would require "a Weston Park-type agreement" whereby the parties privately understood and acknowledged what would have to happen thereafter. The calculation is that this would give pro-Agreement unionists breathing space in which to prove the success of devolution and so increase their prospects against the DUP in an election held at a later date, possibly in the autumn but preferably next year.
However, Sinn Féin would be the first to point out the obvious difficulty with this idea, namely that Mr Trimble and the Ulster Unionists denied, and continue to deny, the very existence of a deal at the conclusion of the Weston Park negotiation in July 2001, key elements of which - most controversially concerning amnesty for on-the-run terrorists and policing reform - remain unfulfilled.
Quite apart from a reluctance by Dublin and London to assume responsibility for the expulsion of Sinn Féin or any other party from a restored Executive, this plan would also seem to be guaranteed to attract opposition from the UUP's leading dissident MPs, Mr Jeffrey Donaldson and Mr David Burnside.
The indications are that they and a majority of existing Ulster Unionist MLAs would prefer to fight any election "from outside the Executive" in the absence of a deal effectively spelling the disbandment of the IRA.