The North's First Minister Mr David Trimble's labelling of the Republic as a narrow, sectarian State has been criticised by the Taoiseach's special adviser, Mr Martin Mansergh.
In an Easter Sunday commemoration, he said: "It saddens me too, in an era today when respect for other traditions is readily accepted and practised, that such respect, as between North and South, is demanded mainly in the one direction, but largely refused in the other.
"No Taoiseach, and certainly not the present one, would speak of the North or of the Unionist tradition in the terms that were used recently about the Republic."
Last year's reburial of 10 IRA volunteers executed by the British had repaid "a debt of honour", Mr Mansergh told the IRA Third Tipperary Brigade commemoration.
However, he implicitly criticised Sinn Féin's Eurosceptic stand. "No one in the republican or nationalist tradition should think of turning their back on Europe, from which, going back to the Battle of Kinsale, so much moral support, assistance and refuge came in the past. I do not understand how any republican in the North could prefer the crown on their notes and coins to the euro or how anyone could fail to see the advantages of placing Ireland in a context broader than the Anglophone world of Britain and the United States to either side of us."
