The Government was not told officially of plans by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to raid Sinn Féin's Stormont office on Friday, writes Miriam Donohoe.
While officially the Government is saying no judgment should be passed until the full facts are known, privately senior officials are "deeply unhappy" at the events.
The first that the Government knew of the raid was when Sinn Féin contacted Mr Ray Bassett of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Secretariat in Belfast early on Friday morning.
"This came as a complete surprise," one Foreign Affairs source said yesterday.
Another source said it appeared that the media were getting information before Government officials. There was also unease that more than 100 members of the police force were involved in seizing a few CDs and files.
A Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman said no notice was given to Foreign Affairs of the raid. Asked if Government officials at other levels were informed he said: "Not that I am aware".
The Government did request a report on the raid from the Northern Secretariat on Friday, which it received that evening. However, it asked for a more detailed account which it hopes to get in advance of the meeting between the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, in Downing Street tomorrow.
Yesterday the Taoiseach's former adviser on the North, the newly elected Senator Martin Mansergh, described the raids as a very serious development which he likened to the sort of thing "you associate more with Turkey and President Mugabe".
Speaking on RTE Radio he said: "We need to keep an open mind and we need to keep awake. . I think it is an extraordinary thing in any democracy for the parliamentary offices of a political party to be heavily raided by a police force."
A Government source insisted last night that Mr Mansergh was speaking on his own behalf and was not detailed by the Government to send out a strong message on the raid.
Mr Mansergh said the charges had better be fully stood up. "Are people suggesting that the IRA even on a contingency basis are prepared to go back to war? When I was in government I never heard that stated by anybody, and yet the implication seems to be that they are."
The last two years had been spent trying to get a situation where everybody would support the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and there was no question but that a raid like this could wreck the prospects of this.
"Most political parties keep a lot of documents on a lot of things. I think the case has to be made and if some of this dates back a year why the particular timing? I am not too sure, for example, if the Irish Government was consulted about this or had been given any detailed information about what precisely is going on."
Yesterday the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, said before his meeting with the Sinn Féin leader, Mr Gerry Adams, that the events of last week had "made life very difficult".
"There are an enormous amount of tensions around the process now. What I'll be saying to all the parties, and we will have contact with the unionists as well, is that it is not a time to be judgmental. It's a time us to be fairly clear-sighted, not just about the short term but about the longer term, and see how we can manage this, because one way or the other it has to be managed," Mr Ahern said.
"I understand people's concerns. I understand people's difficulties, and I understand what people are saying on all sides. What happened on Friday does heighten the tensions from different perspectives. I know it does for unionists and I know it does for Sinn Féin and, of course, it creates difficulties for the SDLP.
"The real message in the meetings in the next few days is how we can manage this. It is difficult. There are problems. It's no good anyone denying that. There are a lot of tensions. But we have to try to handle them and manage them as always."
Asked about the possible suspension of institutions, Mr Ahern said: "Clearly, I do not want to see the institutions suspended because you recall all the difficulties and problems and time it took us to get them up and working.
So we have to be very careful about doing anything that you have to pick up again. I know what's happening in the background, and we'll just have to try and do our best to deal with them. But it is going to be a difficult period."