Sinn Féin has called on the Ulster Unionist leader to visit Short Strand in east Belfast, which has seen a summer of street violence.
Mr David Trimble visited the nearby loyalist Cluan Place area last week and cited security advice for not visiting the nationalist enclave.
Contoversy has raged since the visit, and especially following comments from the PSNI chief officer in Belfast that trouble was being stoked up by the IRA and UVF.
Mr Trimble added to the debate by endorsing Mr Alan McQuillan's assertion that police intelligence pointed to the orchestration of street disturbances by paramilitaries as a means of fighting their wars by other methods.
Mr Trimble told the BBC at the weekend that he believed Mr McQuillan's assessment.
"The basic underlying problem is the fact that republican paramilitaries decided to hot up the interfaces this summer and use it as a political tool to attack the new policing arrangements and SDLP participation on the Policing Board," he said.
His remarks echo those of the SDLP leader, Mr Mark Durkan, who told The Irish Times that Sinn Féin was using the violence and police response to mount a propaganda war for political gain.
"It was a cynical political manoeuvre. It has backfired on them," said Mr Trimble.
"Once you start to stoke up violence, you cannot control it."
But the Sinn Féin chairman, Mr Mitchel McLaughlin, said the invitiation would not have been extended if there was a security risk to the unionist leader.
He challenged Mr Trimble not to take "second-hand" security reports at face value and called on him "to get a true perception of the dreadful nightly intimidation experienced by that community".
Mr Trimble is attending the Earth Summit in South Africa this week. His absence leaves the field clear for his party critics to mobilise ahead of the Ulster Unionist Council meeting scheduled for September 21st.
Mr David Burnside and Mr Jeffrey Donaldson, two MPs who are now permitted to stand as Assembly candidates next May, continue as focal points for unionist dissent.
Mr Burnside, the South Antrim MP, refused to give a ringing endorsement of Mr Trimble's leadership at the weekend.
Mr Burnside spoke of what he saw as the mistake of sharing executive power with Sinn Féin while alleged IRA violence continued.
He told RTÉ that was his "bottom line".
Controversy over the violence and the resulting political fallout is building ahead of today's return to school by girls of Holy Cross primary school in north Belfast.
One report suggested yesterday that the recently freed loyalist leader, Mr Johnny Adair, has urged that the protest by loyalist residents against the schoolgirls from Ardoyne walking to school not be resumed.
Enrolment by new pupils is well down on previous years.
This has been blamed on the protest mounted by loyalist residents during the last school year and the violence which followed.
Mr Adair, released from jail in May after serving a sentence for orchestrating terrorism, is said to be considering a political career and may be looking to next May's Assembly election.
The weekend in both north and east Belfast passed relatively peacefully.
This followed a change in police tactics and high-profile operations backed by the British army.