Sinn Féin MPs should be kicked out of their Commons offices as well as losing allowances as a punishment for IRA criminal activity, Conservative MPs said in the House of Commons in Britain today.
MPs are set to vote to strip the party's four Westminster representatives of up to £440,000 of taxpayer-funded benefits for a year following the Northern Bank raid last December.
Ministers today faced cross-party calls for the quartet including Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, to lose access to all parliamentary facilities that were granted amid Opposition uproar in December 2001.
Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said the MPs should be investigated for any involvement in the robbery and expelled from the Commons if they were implicated.
Three of them "are or have been in the recent past" members of the IRA's ruling army council, he told MPs.
"It would be reasonable in the circumstances to look into the particular to see what further information can be obtained about the activities of members in these matters, for it to come before the House and for the House to take the appropriate action," Mr Trimble said.
"If they have been accessories to this crime, as the IMC report is hinting, well then surely we should be going further. It would be quite proper for those persons to be expelled from this House."
Tory Sir Patrick Cormack said: "How can you possibly defend rules which would still allow the terrorist sympathisers and supporters to come to this House and have facilities within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster."
But Commons leader Peter Hain rejected extending the punishment - insisting that the MPs had been elected and had a duty to work for their constituents even though they refuse to take their seats.
He told MPs that withdrawing the allowances was "an expression of the profound disapproval of this House" at the IRA's activities and Sinn Féin's share of the blame for them.
The need for it was, he said, underlined by the "extraordinary and abhorrent" IRA offer to shoot those responsible for the pub murder of Catholic Robert McCartney.
The plan was proposed by Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy in response to a damning report on the robbery by the Independent Monitoring Commission, which recommended imposing penalties.
The commission concluded that the Provisional IRA had "planned and undertaken" the raid as well as three other major robberies last year.