A referendum on a united Ireland would inflame passions unnecessarily in the run-up to next year's Northern Ireland Assembly elections, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, said yesterday.
Mr Ahern said that holding a referendum - as proposed last weekend by the North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, and subsequently welcomed by Sinn FΘin - could "make a difficult situation appalling", said Mr Ahern.
"I acknowledge that it's part of the Good Friday agreement . . . if people believed there was a change in the position, because consent is the principle that's followed, then they would have a plebiscite."
However, he said we were not yet at that stage. "We know what the result would be. My reason for objecting to it is not that, but I feel it would feed in, in a dangerous way, to the election of 2003, where it will be the first election since the Good Friday agreement where we are trying to stabilise things and calm things down.
"I cannot think of anything that would do more to make a difficult situation appalling than trying to put the question of unification into that kind of circumstance," he said. Mr Ahern was speaking on Sky News's Sunday with Adam Boulton.
He also said he agreed with the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, that the question of an amnesty for paramilitaries on the run needed to be dealt with. The release of convicted prisoners made it essential that the issue was now resolved.
"There are some who had prosecutions awaiting them and others who had no prosecutions at all. Some of them, with the lapse of time, may not mean the offences are as serious as they would have been; it depends what the offences were," said Mr Ahern.
He added that Mr Blair was also committed to helping hundreds of people "exiled" by paramilitaries to return to Northern Ireland.
The Northern Secretary, Dr Reid, has said he doesn't see the need for a referendum.
"The Belfast Agreement allows me to call a poll, it obliges me to call one, if I think the situation has changed radically. But I don't see the prima facie evidence for that at present. I would want to talk to the various parties involved and of course to the Irish Government," he said.