Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

For the record, Sinn Féin has advocated the type of cross-Border grouping approach that is now being proposed, and we very much support that. For the last few years, the political institutions in the North have been on the verge of collapse. Let us remember that the heart of the current contrived crisis is the murder of two men, Jock Davison and Kevin McGuigan. The Fianna Fáil leader's contribution to this crisis was an idiotic call for the suspension of the political institutions.

The basis of the very welcome recommencement of the talks today is the publication of a report by the British and another by the Garda Commissioner. Some elements of these reports have been seized upon by opponents of Sinn Féin, not least the Taoiseach and the leader of Fianna Fáil. I want to deal with two aspects of this. One is that Sinn Féin is totally and absolutely opposed to criminality of all kinds, and we stand with communities across this island and with the police services against criminality. We have paid a price for that: my home has regularly been targeted with bomb alerts, and I and other Sinn Féin representatives are under active death threats. That is a matter of fact. We have had property attacks. We have had one young man, Frank McCabe junior, blinded in one eye because of our party's and his family's stand against criminality.

This is not an academic exercise for us and it is not electorally driven point-scoring. We put our lives on the line against those who are engaging, in the name of republicanism and otherwise, in criminality. Second, like all other Members, Sinn Féin Members are accountable to one grouping - that is, the electorate. They are the people who give us our mandate. Our leadership is the Ard Chomhairle. It is elected democratically annually at our Ard-Fheis.

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