Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein yesterday made an unprecedented attack on the Catholic Church by describing Northern Catholic bishops as "a small number of people, a handful of people". The North's Education Minister, asked what he thought about the bishops' decision to support the Police Board, said Catholics did not take their politics from Rome but from political representatives.
Mr McGuinness also said he believed the Belfast Agreement was "holed below the waterline" and that the Ulster Unionist Party was now being led by the anti-agreement members, Mr Jeffrey Donaldson and Mr David Burnside.
"I am a member of the Catholic Church. The Northern Catholic bishops are a small number of people. The Catholic Church is made up of many tens of thousands of people.
"I stood in the recent Westminster election, and 25,000 people voted for me, not all of them Catholics, but I think a very large percentage of them. A small percentage of the unionist community, I believe, also voted for me rather than for the DUP. So I think that I have a lot of authority in speaking for those people.
"I remember many, many years ago the Catholic bishops, and, indeed, many others throughout the world, told the Catholic community that it was a sin to use contraception. Yet all of the young people and many of the older people used contraception. They made their own decisions.
"The Catholic people, the nationalist people, the republican people, do not take their politics from Rome. They do not take their politics from the Hierarchy. They take their politics from their own political beliefs and from the political leaders that they give a mandate to to represent them."
Mr McGuinness also told reporters in Dungiven, Co Derry, that the British government's refusal to implement in full the Patten proposals, together with a hardening of attitudes within the Ulster Unionist Party against the Belfast Agreement, had damaged the agreement.
"I actually believe that the Good Friday agreement, and it pains me greatly to say it, has been holed below the waterline in a number of areas in relation to David Trimble's attack on the institutions, on his refusal to accept the full implementation of Patten and the British government's capitulation to that and, of course, the refusal of the British government to demilitarise right throughout the North and to fully implement the Patten proposals.
"We are dealing with a unionist party that has effectively seen a coup d'etat. As far as we are concerned within the nationalist/republican constituency, the person who now leads the Ulster Unionist Party is not David Trimble, it's Jeffrey Donaldson, it's Burnside and it's the anti-agreement element who appear to be now more keen to join forces with the rejectionist DUP than they are about fully implementing an agreement that their party signed up to in 1998 on Good Friday."