The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has heralded a persistent crackdown on republican dissidents following Saturday night's car-bomb explosion in Birmingham.
Recent action taken against the "Real IRA" in the Republic is expected to continue while in the North, British security forces and the new Police Service will concentrate their efforts on the "Real IRA" and on loyalist militants.
At the annual Fianna Fβil commemoration of Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown, Co Kildare, yesterday, the Taoiseach said every time political progress was being made, dissidents perpetrated atrocities.
He condemned "those dissidents and fundamentalists for their actions in Birmingham" when they had tried to create obstacles to the implementation of the Belfast Agreement and to the establishment of North-South bodies.
Their actions were unhelpful but predictable, Mr Ahern said. The refusal of groups such as the "Real IRA" to accept the overwhelming will of the people and their attempts to subvert the progress made under the Belfast Agreement was unacceptable.
On the physical force tradition within republicanism, he said unique circumstances existed at the foundation of the State when the Irish people had given retrospective electoral support to the Easter Rising and to the demand for national independence.
In keeping with Fianna Fβil's recent efforts to reclaim the republican middle ground from Sinn FΘin, Mr Ahern rejected the legitimacy of more recent IRA campaigns. "While the civil rights movement was fully justified," he said, "the subsequent IRA campaign, which went far beyond citizens' defence, never had the backing even of a majority of nationalists in Northern Ireland, still less the backing of people in the rest of Ireland.
"To have had any realistic prospect of achieving a 32-county sovereign Ireland, it would have been necessary to pay more attention to the teaching of Wolfe Tone, focused not just on the end, which was separation, but the means to that end, which was uniting Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. That could never be achieved by majoritarian coercion."
Mr Ahern continued: "To end everyone's nightmare has been the mission of the Irish peace process. We have not allowed and will not allow the sceptics to overturn the democratic will of the people, North and South, in 1998."
IRA decommissioning, he said, demonstrated that the republican movement placed a higher value on democratic institutions and inclusive participation in government and the potential of the peace process than on reserving the option of a return to violence.
He described the decision by the Alliance Party to redesignate some of its Assembly members as unionist to elect Mr David Trimble as First Minister as "brave and helpful" and confirmed Alliance would secure a review of the agreement's voting system in return.