McDowell makes stinging attack on SF

Justice debate: The IRA must disband if there is to be any progress towards full implementation of the Belfast Agreement and if Sinn Féin is to play any part in government North or South, the Minister for Justice has said.

Michael McDowell said that until the IRA was disbanded, the Provisional movement "excludes itself from any share in the exercise of powers of government anywhere on this island. This is not merely a statement of policy or opinion, it is a statement of fact."

The call to the IRA to disband, from Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, was a clear indication that the Government's "no fudge, no budge, no deal" message had struck home with the Provisional IRA.

It was only by the entire "risen people" through their elected government standing up to paramilitarism that an end would be brought to the IRA which had even ignored the compelling message of peace delivered by Pope John Paul II in Drogheda in 1979.

Stressing that the Progressive Democrats were founded on democratic, republican principles and repeatedly referring to the party as republican, Mr McDowell delivered an unrelenting attack on Sinn Féin and the IRA.

"There will be no appeasement, no dealing and no compromise by the Irish Government on what are the fundamentals of republican democracy," he said to one of several sustained bursts of enthusiastic applause from delegates.

"There can be no armies, no arms dumps, no beatings, no extortion, no robbery, no breach of the electoral laws, no exiling, no smuggling, no protection rackets and no money-laundering either by or on behalf of those who engage in politics."

Congratulating the Garda for uncovering an IRA money-laundering racket, Mr McDowell said it was a major blow to "the subversion of our democracy by IRA-Sinn Féin criminality".

The IRA-Sinn Féin were well on their way to creating "a state within a state" and "they were using well-placed sleepers and collaborators, some of them posing as pillars of society to achieve that end".

He defended his decision to name Sinn Féin members whom he believed were on the IRA army council, saying they were involved in directing criminality, punishment beatings and the execution of informers and prisoners.

"If some household names pose in public as Mandela figures when in reality, they belong to the Mugabe end of the moral spectrum, it does matter," he said.

He compared Sinn Féin figures saying that they would discuss matters with the IRA to "a seaside Punch and Judy show" with "fictitious dialogue between the Sinn Féin glove puppet making public addresses to the army council glove puppet".

He added: "Grown-up members of the audience will notice that the characters have remarkable similar voices. The sharp-eyed may even see the silhouette of a bearded figure through the cloth curtain."

Mr McDowell also attacked the IRA/Sinn Féin for "its outdated Marxist ideology" which was evident from a perusal of An Phoblacht and the fact that Sinn Féin MEPs sit with former communists from East Germany in the European Parliament.

He said Sinn Féin was the only party in these islands to have a permanent full-time representative to Cuba - or at least it did, until Niall Connolly was arrested while travelling on a forged Irish passport in Colombia.

Mr McDowell also rounded on their links with FARC guerrillas which, he said, were the "armed wing of the Communist Party of Colombia" and which survives by "exporting drugs to the West".