Last week's controversial comments on cross-Border bodies by the Minister for Foreign Affairs had exposed a fault-line in the "pan-nationalist front", Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien told the conference. Dr O'Brien, the party's president, said he believed the Fianna Fail-led government was becoming "uncomfortable" with these cross-Border institutions, and was finding them "a bit embarrassing". He said the episode surrounding the remarks of Mr Andrews showed the Irish Government needed "to play down" the bodies to keep the Ulster Unionist Party on board, and that it needed to play them up to keep Sinn Fein on board. "These operations are mutually incompatible and impracticable," he said.
In a BBC interview last weekend Mr Andrews said he envisaged cross-Border bodies with powers "not unlike a government". He later said he regretted using this phrase. Using an acronym for cross-Border institutions with executive powers, Dr O'Brien said: "It is being suggested that CROBIEP would involve not merely intervention by the Republic in the affairs of Northern Ireland, but also intervention by Northern Ireland in the affairs of the Republic. Nobody in the Republic would accept anything of that last kind."
To loud applause, he said that, as a plebiscite was promised, these institutions could be defeated in the Northern Ireland vote "if the unionists stick together". He didn't believe efforts to get the two governments to impose such bodies would succeed. For the British government it would be "too blatant a betrayal to be sustained before British opinion". And for the Irish Government these institutions would "represent more involvement in the North than the Republic really wants".
See Nuala O'Faolain: page 14