The Provisional IRA should decommission its weapons, the former Workers' Party leader and TD, Mr Tomas Mac Giolla, told the ardfheis.
"When the Belfast Agreement was first published, I could not believe it. The Provos were accepting decommissioning. It is in the agreement. They signed it, so let them bloody decommission."
He added that the Provisional IRA wanted to get into government with the Ulster Unionist Party, the most right-wing party in the island. "The Provos claim to be socialists down here, half-socialists in the North, but totally right-wing in the United States." Mr Mac Giolla, speaking during a debate on the North, said the WP should be fighting its case now for a united socialist republic and a bill of rights.
Delegates passed motions from the Ardcomhairle and the Lower Falls deploring the deadlock in establishing the executive and achieving decommissioning and stressing that the full implementation of the agreement was essential for future progress.
Mr Tom French, the party president, addressing Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA directly, said: "There is one good reason why they should decommission. The people of Ireland have told them that is what they want."
Mr John Lowry, Belfast, said he was confident the talks would eventually produce a positive result. "The people voted, North and South, for a new beginning. The ending of the terrorist campaigns is indeed progress, and there is no doubt that there has been a transformation in the North in that sense. "However, it has to be said that sectarian divisions are probably deeper now than at any time ever before. And that is an issue of grave concern for us, because we have championed the cause of the working class."
Mr Des O'Hagan, South Down, said there would be an enormous sigh of relief if the unionists and then the Provisionals ceased to lock horns and formed a new executive. Northern Ireland, he added, had never been more bitterly divided than it was now. The party's general secretary, Mr Pat Quearney, said the Provisional IRA had called off a sterile and divisive campaign of paramilitary sectarianism and replaced it with an equally sterile and divisive campaign of politicised sectarianism.
"But in the overall scheme of things, this is progress, pitiable as it is. They know what they have to do and they must do it now. Silly liberalism does not understand the nature of the rising Provisional electoral support in the South.
"They are seeking power with a dead drug addict in one hand and a ballot slip in the other. In many working-class communities, heroin is something that kills children. It is a primal feeling for parents. If someone beats or kills anyone associated with heroin, even its pitiful addicts, they will get support. Heroin is not just killing working-class kids, it could kill democracy by filling the sails of Provo fascists."
Mr Francie Donnelly, Down, said Northern people had suffered for 30 years. "Anything that removes that pain would be welcome. We must also recognise that sectarianism was never as rife as it is at present."