Sinn Fein has condemned British government plans to introduce what it says will be a new and more accurate plastic bullet this summer.
The British Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, yesterday announced the new weapon would be available for crowd control from June 1st.
It will be available to the RUC and British army in the North and to police forces across Britain.
A Sinn Fein Assembly member, Mr Gerry Kelly, said plastic bullets should be banned immediately.
"Any other approach is unacceptable," he added.
The Northern Secretary, Dr John Reid, said the British government was carrying forward the recommendations contained in the Patten Report on policing, which said there should be investment in research into finding an acceptable, less dangerous, alternative to the present plastic bullet.
He said the British government would be delighted if the public order situation in the North improved sufficiently to remove the need to resort to baton rounds.
"The whole community has a contribution to make to achieve that aim, but sadly we are not there yet," he said.
The government would ensure every effort was made to find an alternative and to provide the police with a broader range of public order equipment, he added.
"We will continue the search for a safer alternative, but meanwhile we have introduced a round that independent experts have concluded is, on balance, a great deal safer than the existing one.
"Our objective remains the same - to reach the position in which the need to use baton rounds will ultimately disappear."
There has been a reduction in the use of plastic bullets in the North in recent years. Since the current version was introduced in 1994, 13,264 have been fired, but the Northern Ireland Office said only 112 were fired in 1999 and only 26 last year.
However, Mr Kelly insisted that there must be an immediate ban on the weapon and said it would be another issue on which Sinn Fein's support for the new policing service would depend.
"Any police service that trains its personnel in the use of this weapon or is prepared to use it cannot expect to win the support of nationalists and republicans," he said.