Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have escalated their increasingly bitter verbal conflict, signalling the start of an intense campaign for the local government and European Parliament elections in June, write Mark Brennock and Dan Keenan.
Four Government Ministers and several other party figures made strong attacks on Sinn Féin at the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis at the weekend.
The robust criticism of the party comes a week after the Taoiseach attracted an angry response from Mr Gerry Adams for saying he always believed the Sinn Féin leader had once been in the IRA.
Although Mr Ahern said at the time that his remark had "nothing to do with electioneering", the concerted criticism of Sinn Féin at the ardfheis was seen as part of a clear strategy for confronting the threat from that party in June's local and European Parliament elections.
Sinn Féin's chairman, Mr Mitchel McLaughlin, last night responded, saying Fianna Fáil were using an electoral ploy. He in turn accused Mr Ahern's Government of having "walked away from its responsibilities in relation to the peace process".
Fianna Fáil sources confirmed that the decision to seek to publicly discredit Sinn Féin came amid growing concern at the apparent steady growth in support for the party. Their own members reported that Sinn Féin was making inroads in urban and rural areas.
In his address on Saturday night, the Taoiseach called again on the republican movement to give "an absolute commitment to exclusively peaceful means", involving "the complete retirement of all paramilitary activity. Nationalist Ireland, this republican party, the Irish people, demand no less."
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, accused Sinn Féin members of behaving as if the Irish flag belonged to them; the Minister for Communications, Mr Dermot Ahern, attacked them for turning his native Co Louth into an "economic wasteland" in the past; the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, accused them of insulting the memory of Irish peacekeepers by spreading "utterly irresponsible nonsense" about EU security policy; and the Minister for Arts and Sport, Mr O'Donoghue, accused the party of continuing links with vigilantism.
Mr McLaughlin responded that Sinn Féin was "up to any challenge from Fianna Fáil and the other establishment parties, North and South". He said the Taoiseach "would be better off facing up to his responsibilities instead of constantly hectoring Irish republicans".
He said Sinn Féin would not "accept lectures from a Government that has walked away from its responsibilities in relation to the peace process". The Taoiseach will discuss the increasingly remote prospects for progress in the North when he meets the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, in Dublin on Thursday.
In an interview in The Star on Sunday yesterday, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, likened Sinn Féin to the Nazis. He said: "When it comes to the next election, we shouldn't do what the people of Germany did in the 1930s when they elected to office people that liked having it both ways - the Brownshirts and the Nazis which were a threat to democracy."
A Sinn Féin spokesman described Mr McDowell's comments as a "desperate and irrational attempt by an ignorant and arrogant individual to keep himself in the headlines".