The importance of decommissioning for the successful implementation of the Belfast Agreement was stressed by the Taoiseach in a statement on the situation in the North.

Mr Ahern said that unionism owed it to itself to dispel the persistent doubts about its real willingness to enter into the inclusive partnership and other arrangements it signed up to under the agreement, especially given the growing loyalist dissident attacks on Catholics which were obviously designed to bring about the collapse of the agreement.

"But notwithstanding the severe pressure that some sections of the nationalist community have been put under, republicans can also do more to assist this situation. The Irish Government acknowledges the inestimable benefits that all the continuing ceasefires have brought.

"The pledge of office taken by ministers precludes any use or threat of violence, and entry into government by Sinn Fein would itself send the most powerful signal that the war is over, as far as republicans are concerned. All armed groups should acknowledge that they have, too, an inescapable contribution to make to democracy and demilitarisation in Northern Ireland by the permanent removal of weapons from the political scene.

"The Good Friday agreement cannot work on the basis that there will be no decommissioning. It will only work if the institutions are established now, and if confidence is created that a process of decommissioning will be achieved under the aegis of Gen de Chastelain and in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement."

Mr Ahern was speaking during a debate on the British-Irish Agreement (Amendment) Bill, a technical measure to ensure the change in the status of the followup programme to the current peace programme does not inhibit the special EU programmes body carrying out the functions envisaged for it in the original legislation.

He said that if progress was to be made, it was first essential to establish the institutions. "This would, of course, have to be on the clear understanding that all major commitments under the agreement would be fulfilled in good faith within the timescales set out in the agreement.

"In particular, all the indications are that the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, however desirable as a confidence-building measure on its own merits, will not take place in advance of the establishment of the institutions.

"But it is equally clear that the institutions will only be sustainable if confidence and trust are built and developed through the fulfilment of commitments under the agreement. The delays in implementing different parts of the agreement are unfortunately mutually reinforcing, and we are coming close to the point where, without progress on institutions, the May 2000 target for achieving the decommissioning of paramilitary arms will soon cease to be credible.

"Realistically, it is only in the context of a confidence in functioning democratic institutions that it will be possible to persuade the different groups involved permanently to dispose of their weapons."

The Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, said the republican movement was asking people to accept there was no intention to use weapons again and that decommissioning was not required.

"Yet the same IRA has apparently killed three people and maimed another in the very recent past."

He added that the information on the location of the graves of the "disappeared" may have been given in good faith. "But I think there is no way that one can adopt an understanding view of the IRA in regard to the killing of three people in the last two months. That is not consistent with being on ceasefire."

The Labour spokesman on foreign affairs, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, said the failure to offer any movement on decommissioning, together with unconfirmed reports of the involvement of the republican movement in three recent murders in the North, all continued to raise legitimate questions about the democratic credentials of Sinn Fein.

"You cannot be half a democrat. The commitment to exclusively democratic means of all of those parties, whose members will hold ministerial office in an executive, must be absolute and beyond question.

"If the republican movement is committed to the Good Friday agreement, which includes a commitment to the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms by May of next year, just 11 months away, why can they not make some movement now, some small gesture, that would break the logjam and allow the full implementation of the agreement?"