The Taoiseach has called for a final effort to reach a comprehensive agreement in Northern Ireland, saying there was so little left to agree that it would be "an act of insanity" not to complete a deal.
In an interview on RTÉ's This Week programme yesterday Mr Ahern also rejected Mr Gerry Adams claim that he had said five years ago that the release of the killers of Det Garda Jerry McCabe would be "no problem" in the context of a deal.
He demanded a clear commitment from the IRA not to engage in future criminality, saying the IRA had not yet given one, and that there was no difference between Fianna Fáil and the PDs on this issue.
The Taoiseach said he believed that if the Rev Ian Paisley had not made his speech in Ballymena - in which he said the IRA must be "humiliated" and "wear sackcloth and ashes" in public - a deal could have been done. He said the IRA had not said "No" to the deal until the final 24 hours, and he believed the Ballymena speech had an influence on this.
Urging a final effort he said: "What's left in this in my view is small enough fry compared to what we had actually finished last Wednesday. Really, it just re- quires a bit of cool nerves, a bit of straight negotiation on very few issues, a few chances to be taken . . . if we all do it collectively this can be finished. There isn't 10 hours work left in it, at the end of a year in which we must have spent thousands of hours at it."
He said the big issues including decommissioning, demilitarisation, policing, justice and the stability of the institutions were all resolved. What was left was "the issue of transparency and photographs. We never got agreement on the photograph issue".
He said Sinn Féin had consistently said it had a problem with this. "Obviously the Ballymena speech I think put an end to it".
He said that left to themselves, the Irish and British governments would not have seen photographs as necessary. "The governments would have been quite happy with John de Chastelain and his team calling it," he said.
Mr Ahern said he and the Progressive Democrats were at one in demanding the IRA sign up to a pledge not to get involved in criminality in the future, and they rejected Mr Adams's claim that they had effectively done this.
He said the governments had said there must be an end to "all paramilitary activity and other illegal activity". It was important because "this is about thefts, it's about robberies, it's about kneecapping, it's about the end of criminality", he said. Yet "the IRA answered our issue about paramilitary activity, but it didn't answer the issue about other illegal activity.
"It's no good Gerry Adams saying as he did this weekend that that should be understood. The IRA are past masters at saying things have to be clear. It's not clear, and what is clear is that they haven't answered it, so they have to answer it." He said it was "not correct" for Mr Adams to say, as he has done twice, that around the time of the signing of the Good Friday agreement the Government had given him the understanding that the McCabe killers would be released.
"The McCabe killers were not even convicted at that stage. Technically they were still innocent people. The court case wasn't for another 10 months.
"In fairness to Gerry, he usually has a good memory, but on this one he is wrong."