Sinn Féin Ardfheis: The Sinn Féin ardfheis, which opened in Dublin last night, backed a motion highly critical of the new voter registration procedures in the North.
Mr Pat Doherty, party vice-chairman and MP for West Tyrone, condemned new electoral arrangements in the North which, he said, had removed 211,000 names from the Northern Ireland electoral list.
Accusing the British government of political motivation, he said: "This legislation is primarily aimed at trying to ring-fence the electoral growth of Sinn Féin in the Six Counties."
He continued: "This legislation was introduced on foot of false claims by Sinn Féin's political opponents that the party was involved in electoral fraud."
Mr Doherty said new arrangements were aimed at "preventing what unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson described last November, after the Assembly election results, as the unionists' worst nightmare scenario, but which is really Jeffrey's nightmare scenario - that is Sinn Féin becoming the largest political party in the Six Counties".
He said the British government was prepared to "drive a horse" through the democratic process at its most important point - the exercise of a person's right to vote.
"Those people denied the right to vote are not just potential voters for Sinn Féin. They are potential voters for all the parties - nationalist and unionist - and not surprisingly those most affected by this legislation are working-class people in both unionist and nationalist areas."
He accused the North's chief electoral officer of making "an appalling admission" that the new arrangements would mean that the total electorate would fall annually and that there was nothing he could do about it.
"He is administering the annual shredding of the electoral register," Mr Doherty said.
He also denounced the visit to the North last week by the Taoiseach, and accused Mr Ahern of "lowering expectations" concerning the all-Ireland agenda.
In an aside, he added: "We all know Bertie was never in the IRA".
As the only all-Ireland party, Sinn Féin was the "generation that carried the duty to drive a republican all-Ireland agenda forward", according to the head of Sinn Féin's All Ireland group, Ms Martina Anderson.
"We have a vision of a new and different Ireland which itself can only be achieved with the participation of the people of Ireland."
She said that "collectively all republican activists from Kerry to Derry have a duty and a responsibility to cultivate that demand by showing through the all-Ireland strategies now in place how a new Ireland of equals can be achieved". She said that "even if we took power tomorrow we could not give people an Ireland of equals - people have to want it and demand it".
Sinn Féin activists worked "24/7" to permeate its primary objective of the reunification of equals.
"No other demand should compete with this," she said, during a debate on an "all-Ireland agenda".
One delegate told the conference in the debate on neutrality that Fine Gael in its stance for a European defence policy was "putting the bullet back into Irish politics" while Sinn Féin had worked to take it out.
The party's leader in the Dáil, Mr Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, proposed the motion that elected representatives in the North should have a right to speak in the Dáil and Seanad.