A British memo portraying the Minister for Foreign Affairs as a "green" nationalist with no understanding of unionist concerns was leaked in an attempt to undermine the peace process, the Government said last night.
A spokesman also rejected the document's sarcastic portrayal of Mr Cowen as arguing the Sinn Fein position in meetings with Mr Peter Mandelson. The document contained "gross distortion" and was "mischievous bordering on malevolent".
The memo was circulated in Belfast yesterday by Mr Chris McGimpsey of the Ulster Unionist Party. He said it had been given to him by a British civil servant who was concerned at its content and felt it was important that it be made public.
The document contains a single paragraph from a longer document. It says the line expressed by the Minister, in a discussion with Mr Mandelson on April 18th last, was that "beyond the constitutional acceptance that Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom, there should be no further evidence of Britishness in the governance of Northern Ireland".
It suggests that the senior British official who wrote the document expected the Taoiseach's special adviser on Northern Ireland, Dr Martin Mansergh, who was present at the meeting, to "water down" Mr Cowen's position. However, "there was no disposition among members of his entourage" to do this, the memo writer notes.
A Government spokesman said last night this was a "gross distortion which bears no resemblance to what was actually said either in content or context".
At meetings, he said, Ministers put forward the views of the Government and nobody else.
However, Mr McGimpsey said the views reported as having been expressed by Mr Cowen were "totally and completely unacceptable to all unionists. It runs contrary to the basic tenets of the Good Friday agreement. The most pro-agreement unionist imaginable would find this unacceptable".
He said the fact that Dr Martin Mansergh did not intervene tended to convince him that this was also the view of the Taoiseach. Another senior unionist source remarked that Mr Cowen "has all the diplomacy of a Semtex bomb".
Meanwhile a spokesman for Mr Mandelson said he would not comment on "alleged leaks of alleged documents".