The next three weeks will see the Good Friday agreement "stand or fall", the Sinn Féin TD, Mr Martin Ferris, has said at a debate on the peace process with the PUP leader, Mr David Ervine, and the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr O'Donoghue.
Mr O'Donoghue, a former justice minister, said confidence in the Belfast Agreement "had to be restored".
"The biggest problem facing us is the RUC/PSNI," Mr Ferris told a large audience at the Institute of Technology, Tralee, Co Kerry, on Thursday night. The British government legislation on policing "will decide if the Good Friday agreement falls or stands".
Mr Ferris said he could not see Sinn Féin supporting the Northern police service if the new legislation did not mean the full implementation of the Patten report. "If that is the case, we can't move the peace process," Mr Ferris said.
Yet there were hopeful signs. Mr Ervine, once a "mortal enemy", could now come to "revolutionary Fenit" as a loyalist, Mr Ferris added.
In a speech interrupted by sustained applause, Mr Ervine said the Northern Troubles were not really Irish troubles, any more than those in Bosnia were Bosnian troubles. "They are human troubles."
Both sides at the time of the Good Friday agreement had failed to recognise the legitimacy of each other as human beings, he said. "Who can say who the real David Ervine is, who the real Gerry Adams is? The one single thing that is required absolutely is that we offer legitimacy to each other as human beings, not for the people we were but for the people we are."
The fundamentalists and the moralists would like to disagree that the conveyor belt to deliver peace had begun, Mr Ervine added. But "there would always be purer unionists, purer Provisionals, purer whoevers . . . to bite the heels of the visionary".