The Taoiseach appealed for any further information available on where the IRA placed the remains of the so-called disappeared.

Mr Ahern said he hoped any information known to anybody was passed to the Garda and members of the commission dealing with the issue. "If there is anyone else who can help, or anyone previously involved who has any information, they certainly should assist."

He knew, he added, from contacts he had last week, that it was thought the matter would be dealt with relatively quickly, taking a day or maybe a second day at most. As he had said before, most concern should be for the families of those killed.

Mr Ahern said it was now almost a year since the INLA had identified the location of bodies in France. Although maps were marked, and sites were looked at, no body had been located.

The Taoiseach was replying to the Labour leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, who referred to the "extraordinary agony" which the families of the disappeared were going through. The House, he added, had passed with some speed the legislation to ensure the perpetrators of those crimes would be immune from prosecution.

"Would he join with me in condemning the extraordinary inhumanity that is compounding the agony of the families of the bereaved, and call on Sinn Fein and the IRA to co-operate fully, and indicate quite clearly, where the remains of these unfortunate people are buried so that this desperate situation can be brought to a speedy conclusion?"

Mr Austin Currie (FG, Dublin West) said: "Is the Taoiseach aware that some of the people currently in leadership positions in Sinn Fein were involved in the original decision to murder these people, to keep secret their places of burial and to malign their memory? These people now have a responsibility to accurately pinpoint the places where they were buried and to end the indescribable trauma of the relatives of the disappeared."

Mr Quinn suggested that Mr Ahern should personally contact the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, and representatives of the IRA in so far as he could identify them, to ask for their full co-operation.

"This is an organisation which has consummate ability to locate arms dumps, to hide arms right across this island and know their precise location. Are we to take it that they do not know where they located the bodies of the people they callously murdered?"

Mr Ahern said he had discussed the matter with Mr Adams last Friday. There were intermediaries endeavouring to use all the information they had been given and, hopefully, that would prove successful. "It is regrettable that it has gone on, but it was not certainly the intention, as I understand it . . . "

Asked by the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, if the information on location provided was specific, the Taoiseach said Sinn Fein believed it to be correct. Hopefully, it would prove to be so, he added.