Ahern reaction: The Government's allegations that the IRA is involved in major criminality have been backed up by An Garda Síochána's raids this week, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has said.
Defending his decision to lay the blame for the Northern Bank robbery at the door of Sinn Féin, Mr Ahern said: "I wouldn't have said [ it] if I hadn't been given the advice.
"When the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, who I have enormous respect for, and the Garda Síochána tell me their professional opinion, not alone have I a responsibility to do that but I have a duty to do so.
"When it comes down to taking whose word, I will always take the Commissioner's. If I didn't do that I would be an odd kind of a Taoiseach," he declared.
Sinn Féin would have to obey democratic rules and respect the security in the Republic and Northern Ireland, Mr Ahern said in Tipperary.
However, he refused to exclude Sinn Féin from direct talks: "The policy of exclusion will not help, but when you are included there is a price.
"The price is democratic means, respecting the security forces North and South: the reformed security forces of the North, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and working for a democratic future.
"That is sometimes painful but everybody has to understand that. That is what we want to achieve. It would be easy to give a knee-jerk reaction today, as it would have been last week.
"I am not going down that road. The prize is a comprehensive settlement," said Mr Ahern, who has faced calls to exclude Sinn Féin by the Democratic Unionist Party.
"We are against exclusion. We had 30 years of exclusion in Northern Ireland. All we ended up with were thousands of people killed, thousands of people maimed, a few generations of young people from Northern Ireland and many from the Border region living in the United States, Canada and Australia to get away from it," he said.
He said he had "endlessly" made the point over the last few months that IRA criminality had to stop and decommissioning had to happen.
The Garda operation is ongoing, he said: "So I don't want to say anything about the detail of that. As I said on Tuesday in the Dáil, the CAB is involved, the special criminal investigation unit is involved, the Garda fraud investigation unit is involved.
"It is a nationwide operation by the Garda. Obviously, I want to congratulate the Garda for the work that they have been doing over the last number of weeks. This is difficult work.
"Obviously, on the face of it, this looks like a major money-laundering operation, and it is major. It is best that we leave this work to the gardaí and support the gardaí as we always would." The Government, he said, was totally committed to the implementation of the Belfast Agreement: "Ultimately, my only interest is getting a comprehensive settlement.
"We came to a stage in the last two years that we could not build enough trust and confidence - not between ourselves and the republican movement, that wasn't the issue - it was to get the parties that need to make the institutions work.
"We could not get them to move any further as long as criminality and the issue of decommissioning were there," he said.
The Government was as ready now as it had ever been. "We haven't changed our minds. We want to see the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. These events are terrible and shocking but we don't have the killings and the mayhem that we had in the past. We just want to get to the end."
