Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

It shows that Sinn Féin's real interest was never in bedding down the Good Friday Agreement and working its institutions in good faith but in maintaining instead an environment of instability and uncertainty — a persistent atmosphere of crisis in which normal politics is impossible and extremism thrives.

It is myopic in the extreme that Sinn Féin cannot see that the real problems on this island do not derive from the partition between North and South but from the endemic partitions within Northern Ireland itself. That party has said and done nothing to demonstrate any awareness and acknowledgement of the crisis around it — the Balkanisation of Northern Ireland. It has done nothing to persuade the people of the South, who remain to be persuaded, that the best solution to Northern Ireland as "a failed political entity" would be to collapse that failed, dysfunctional and still violent entity into the jurisdiction of this State. If the communities that make up the North cannot function together, why should anyone believe they would function better by attempting to smother them within a largely uninterested Southern embrace?

On any rational analysis, Northern Ireland as a demonstrably functioning entity should be a precondition that is proven to exist before anyone thinks about Irish unity, rather than the proven failure of the North being a reason for thinking about the unity of this island as a whole. If that is the unmanageable nature and extent of their problem, then we down here do not have the solution. We should not pretend we do.

I speak as someone entitled to describe himself both as a Nationalist and republican within the meaning of those words before they were hijacked by those who sought to appropriate the concepts of nationalism and republicanism to ends that are narrow, divisive and ultimately as sectarian as those advanced by their political opponents. However, it is no longer adequate to suppose that sectarianism and its bitter and corrosive divisions will somehow have been tackled just because a devolved assembly and Executive are returned to Stormont. In Northern Ireland, there is increasing evidence of a hardening of separateness between both communities, of a society that is becoming more divided by tribal identifications. Parallel with efforts to restore the political institutions, we need a real effort on all sides to tackle the sectarian divisions that have increased rather than diminished since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

I repeat that Sinn Féin and the IRA have a genuine contribution to make to political progress on this island. However, that contribution involves not just the seven-years-late delivery of arms that should never have been acquired or used in the first place. It requires also a genuine commitment to reconciliation between neighbours. If republicans want to unite this country, they must recognise as a task for them the need to address rather than exacerbate the structural divisions within Northern Ireland.

These exist, for example, where people live and where they send their children to school. Good people who envisage the best in government now contemplate a future of passive co-existence between ethnic and religious communities that we expect will continue to eye each other uneasily over the fences of entrenched differences.

In that context, Sinn Féin's response or lack thereof to the murder of Joseph Rafferty in Dublin last April is as much a test of the sincerity of that party's commitment to peace as was the murder of Robert McCartney in Belfast last year. Both families made demands which are directed at us, as public representatives, party leaders, Members and voters, and are aimed at the way in which we do our business. If we do not stand with them, we stand against them and against all the other families who will in time take their place.

With decommissioning achieved, we must not assume that all else will automatically fall into place. We must not lessen our resolve to see the institutions re-established and the political vacuum filled. We must not shirk the challenge of creating a peaceful, democratic and lawful society in Northern Ireland.

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