Time to get off the pot, Ahern tells the IRA

Harry McGee and Senan Hogan

The paramilitary outfit should immediately cease all violence, Mr Ahern says in an interview published today in Hot Press magazine.

His call comes after Taoiseach Bertie Ahern revealed yesterday that the IRA was still recruiting and training members and engaging in criminal activity.

This is despite an appeal made by Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams earlier this month for the IRA to give up its “armed struggle” and use political means to achieve its aims of ending British rule in the North.

In today’s interview, which echoes a famously forthright one with Charles Haughey published in Hot Press in the early 1980s, Mr Ahern said some people have missed the “significance” of Mr Adams’s appeal.

Explaining his remarks to the Irish Examiner last night, Mr Ahern said: “We regard (Mr Adams’s) statement as a response to what we said to him in January, when we met him in Government Buildings and said to him and Martin McGuinness that the only two remaining issues were ones only Sinn Féin and the provisional movement could deal with: full decommissioning and an end to criminality.”

Mr Ahern was cautiously optimistic the peace process could be put back on track following the Westminster elections in May, but only if the IRA responded positively to Mr Adams’s appeal.

“If Gerry Adams’s statement is positively dealt with by the Provisional movement, then there’s a possibility to getting back to discussions that we had prior December 8 [when talks collapsed because of the decommissioning and criminality issues],” he said.

However, an obvious difficulty, he said, was whether there would be “any possibility of trust and confidence” among unionists, particularly the DUP, even if there were IRA decommissioning.

He also stressed that were Sinn Féin to go into government in the North, there would have to be movement on the policing issue.

Meanwhile, Mr Ahern said Fianna Fáil and Labour could form “a good government” but it would not happen with Pat Rabbitte as leader.

“I think that Fianna Fáil would have quite a lot of common with the trade union movement,” he said.

“If Fianna Fáil were in government with Labour in the future, it would be a good government.

“I don’t envisage that happening because Pat Rabbitte has excluded that possibility.”

Fianna Fáil would instead continue to work with the Progressive Democrats, Mr Ahern said.

“We are extremely amicable... We will go into the next election with the PDs as a choice for the people.”