Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I do not know the make-up of the present army council. I had some heated exchanges about that yesterday. I will not go over that ground again. I do not know the whereabouts of any arms dumps. The position of the Garda is that we will continue to seek out arms anywhere. No easy line will be taken on that.

Regarding the other issues, I appreciate Deputy Kenny's bipartisan position of support. There have been comments in recent days regarding appeasement and the failure of the system. In dealing with these issues one must have a steady nerve. In Northern Ireland today almost nobody is killed, unlike what happened over the previous 30 years. There are not too many incidents. There is much political engagement and a significant amount of investment. Tourism is quite healthy. Northern Ireland has a different image on this island and abroad in the greater world. There has been much progress and development.

However, there seems to be a sinister view that one can, on the one hand, continue the development of democratic politics of a kind and, on the other, that it is all right to engage in criminality. There was a view that for some time this was tolerated in order to try to move the process forward. However, ten years on, we cannot continue to do that. What offended me, and the reason I have taken a tough line on this, was the idea that a comprehensive agreement could be negotiated on the basis of trust and confidence while this kind of criminality went on. It is not a question of the size of the bank raid, and it was a big bank raid. I did not show anger regarding earlier events, for example, the raid on the Makro store in Dunmurry last Easter during which £1 million worth of goods was taken and staff were tied up by armed men. The International Monitoring Commission blamed the Provisional IRA for that. We in this House took that coolly enough. In October £2 million worth of cigarettes were stolen from the Gallagher warehouse in north Belfast when a gang held up employees. The PSNI stated the Provisional IRA was responsible for that. The Provisional IRA is also believed to be responsible for the abduction and robbery at a Strabane bank branch on 26 September.

What I find really offensive, and again I say it here in the House with members of Sinn Féin present because I did not go around speaking with a megaphone over Christmas, is that there was an ability to turn off all punishment beatings while negotiations were in progress but as soon as the negotiations failed there was a string of them — they are again a nightly occurrence. I will give Sinn Féin full marks for discipline, but not for anything else.

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