The Conservatives are pressing Northern Ireland ministers for an assurance that members of the IRA will not be allowed to participate in any community-based restorative justice schemes to be funded by the British government.
In a fresh intervention on the controversial issue last night, shadow Northern Ireland Secretary David Lidington also suggested that vetting procedures for such schemes would have to have regard to intelligence information as well as criminal records.
Draft protocols governing the operation of schemes to help with low-level crime of concern in local communities are the subject of an ongoing consultation due to end next month. The SDLP has been to the fore in raising doubts about the protocols.
Both unionist parties and members of the North's Policing Board have also raised questions about an alleged failure to require persons operating the schemes to accept and fully co-operate with the PSNI, and the possible involvement of people convicted for scheduled offences.
Now the Conservatives have extended their campaign to bar members of the Provisional IRA and other proscribed organisations from participation. In the Commons last week the North's criminal justice minister David Hanson said he would want "to reflect" on the point raised by Mr Lidington's colleague Laurence Robertson.
Noting that for a number of years people had not been arrested for being members of the IRA, Mr Robertson asked: "If they are members of the IRA will they be able to partake in the scheme?"
Mr Hanson replied: "As I have already said, the guidelines make it clear that nobody involved in paramilitary activity or criminality can be involved in the scheme."
In a letter to Mr Hanson, Mr Lidington observes that the IRA remains an illegal organisation in the UK and the Republic, that membership remains a criminal offence in both jurisdictions, and that Irish Ministers have only recently stated that the existence of the Provisionals as "an army" was incompatible with the Constitution of the Republic.
"I therefore hope you are now able to give an assurance that [ British] government policy is that no member of a proscribed terrorist organisation will be allowed to take part in a CRJ scheme," Mr Lidington told Mr Hanson.
He added that, in deciding who should be subject to such a ban, he hoped the minister would accept that "it will not be sufficient to refer to the records of convictions" and that "it will be necessary also to have regard to intelligence information".