Ahern warns against holding united Ireland referendum

A referendum on a united Ireland would inflame passions unnecessarily in the run up to next year's Northern Ireland Assembly elections, the Taoiseach claimed today in a renewal of his opposition to the proposal.

Mr Bertie Ahern said today that holding a referendum - as proposed last weekend by the North’s First Minister Mr David Trimble and subsequently welcomed by Sinn Féin - could "make a difficult situation appalling".

"I acknowledge that it's part of the Good Friday Agreement...if people believed there was a change in the position, because consent is the principle that's followed, then they would have a plebiscite.

"We're not at that stage. We know what the result would be. My reason for objecting to it is not that, but I feel it would feed in, in a dangerous way, to the election of 2003, where it will be the first election since the Good Friday Agreement where we are trying to stabilise things and calm things down.

"I cannot think of anything that would do more to make a difficult situation appalling than trying to put the question of unification into that kind of circumstance," he told Sky News' Sunday with Adam Boulton.

Mr Ahern also said he agreed with the British Prime Minister that the question of an amnesty for paramilitaries on the run needed to be dealt with. He said the release of convicted prisoners made it essential that the issue was now resolved.

Mr Tony Blair has not ruled out the possibility that an amnesty could be offered to terrorists, to the fury of unionists and Tories.

"There are some who had prosecutions awaiting them and others who had no prosecutions at all. Some of them, with the lapse of time, may not mean the offences are as serious as they would have been; it depends what the offences were," the Taoiseach said.

He noted that Mr Blair was also committed to helping hundreds of people "exiled" by paramilitaries to return to Northern Ireland.

Additional reporting by PA