The Attorney General, Mr Michael McDowell, delivered a sharp rebuke to Sinn Féin last night, saying that nobody with a divided loyalty between the State and the IRA had a moral or constitutional right to seek election.
"Any person or party who owes a loyalty to the IRA, to its Army Council, to its 'court martials', to its claimed right to inflict murder and torture as a system of discipline or punishment, or to any putative sovereign authority which is not the Irish State, simply has no business in the Dáil or the Seanad," he said.
Mr McDowell was speaking at the convention at which he was selected as a candidate for the Progressive Democrats in Dublin South East. He said that this State, through the Good Friday agreement, had committed itself to a process of "national reconciliation in which the bomb, the bullet, the drugs trade, the arms trade, the practice of torture-mutilation (sometimes referred to by the media euphemistically as 'punishment beatings'), baseball bats and balaclavas" had no place legally, morally, politically or historically.
There was an obvious danger that a new generation of Irish voters who had grown to adulthood in the era of the peace process might be misled into believing that somehow it was all right to be ambivalent about "these obvious threats to democracy and human rights".
There was also a danger that a new generation of voters might consider that the duty of loyalty to the Irish State did not apply to any citizen who sought election to Dáil Éireann, or to any citizen who campaigned for such candidates, or to any person who voted for them.
If, as voters, we compromised our duty of exclusive loyalty to the Constitution, the State, the courts, the Oireachtas, the Defence Forces and the Garda, we would "reap a bitter whirlwind of ambivalence, ambiguity and, ultimately, of subversion and devaluation of democracy and the rule of law itself". Sinn Féin simply could not be allowed to dine à la carte from the menu of human rights, social justice and the rule of law.
"They constitute a real threat to our economic wellbeing. Their potential for damaging our economic wellbeing is a dagger at the throat of social justice. The business of keeping the Provisional movement on side for political process cannot, in the short or the long term, blind us to the huge dangers of adopting a naive and uncritical approach to what they really stand for," he said.