The State must respond to the continuing grave threats posed by international terrorists and dissident republicans, the Minister for Justice has said.
Michael McDowell said that despite recent moves towards peace by the Provisional IRA, "we must not lose sight of the very real threat still posed by dissident groups".
"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA would, if allowed the opportunity, visit mayhem on innocent people in pursuit of their objectives," he added.
Accepting the proposition that al-Qaeda-style cells may attack anywhere in Europe and on a greater scale than long-established indigenous terrorist groups such as Eta or the IRA, he said the State must confront that threat while still adhering to human rights norms.
"Our experiences over the past few decades in confronting the domestic terrorist threat have served us well. For the most part, therefore, we have simply applied our domestic counter-terrorism legislation to the international terrorist groups," Mr McDowell said.
He was referring to the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act 2005, enacted in March 2005, which effectively seeks to apply the Offences Against the State Acts to the international terrorist threat in the same way that they applied to domestic varieties.
"We cannot afford to be naively optimistic about the power of inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue to lessen or eliminate this threat," he said.
Mr McDowell was speaking at a conference, Human Rights and Security: Lessons from the Past for the Future, which was organised by the Institute for British-Irish Studies at University College Dublin yesterday.
The chairwoman of the Northern Ireland Commission on Human Rights, Prof Monica McWilliams, said the North provided a useful model in the study of "conflict transformation".