The Taoiseach has expressed disquiet that while negotiating towards a political settlement in the North, senior Sinn Féin members would have known about last month's Northern Bank robbery.
His comments on RTÉ were in response to PSNI Chief Constable Mr Hugh Orde's statement that the IRA was responsible for the raid. The Taoiseach said yesterday: "We have no reason to doubt his current assessment." He was speaking after having a long phone conversation with Mr Blair.
"The situation creates a real and predictable difficulty for the process, and it obviously has the potential to affect our capacity to make early progress," he said.
"I am upset quite frankly that in the period when we were in intense talks trying to get comprehensive agreement, that my information is now that people in very senior positions would have known what was going on."
However, he added: "I think ultimately we all have to be big enough to keep the peace process going forward. Going back to where we were in the past and leaving things drift and creating the kind of problems we had in the past would be the wrong thing to do . . . I still believe in the greater picture that we must keep going because we don't want to go back to a period of violence, we don't want to go back to instability."
He said that in the failed negotiations before Christmas, the governments had wanted a particular wording to be agreed by Sinn Féin concerning an end to IRA criminality. "It was not possible for the Sinn Féin leadership to agree with that.
"Therefore, as one of my colleagues said in those negotiations, if they can't agree, why is it they cannot agree? And of course that leaves the inevitability of the question: Is the reason because they knew these kind of events were going on?"