The British government has played into the hands of loyalist paramilitaries who want to exploit the political vacuum in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said tonight.
After almost 90 minutes of talks with Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy at Stormont, the West Belfast MP said the Government appeared to have no plan for restoring devolution, which was suspended this month by Mr Murphy's predecessor John Reid.
Referring to recent violence along the sectarian peace line in East Belfast, Mr Adams said: "Pretend for a moment that we did not have a Good Friday Agreement.
"Pretend for a moment that we don't even have political institutions.
"We need equality of treatment. We need a decent acceptable policing service. We need a human rights-centred ethos.
"We need de-militarisation. We need armed actions, violent actions, sectarian violence of any kind stopped.
"So we need all of these things, and this is a government that has admitted that it has not fulfilled its obligations to bring about these matters.
"So while we are in difficulties - and I am still convinced that we will eventually sort it all out - this makes it much, much more difficult.
"And I come back to the issue of the Short Strand (area of East Belfast) and other areas where there is sectarian violence against Catholics in interface areas.
"All it takes is for one of the unionist paramilitaries to get lucky once, to kill a child with an improvised hand grenade, or to burn a family out with a petrol bomb, to bring all of this to where none of us want it to be.
"That's how serious the situation is, and the British government's decision to suspend the institutions has encouraged those people.
"I mean why on earth has there been an intensity of attacks on the Short Strand over the last few weeks?"
Mr Adams was commenting just 24 hours after the IRA announced it was suspending contact with the independent de-commissioning body because of what it said was the failure of the Government to honour its commitments under the Good Friday Agreement.
The Provisionals, who have been under pressure to disband since a succession of allegations against them surfaced forcing the suspension of devolution, also accused others in the peace process of trying "to impose unacceptable and untenable ultimatums on the IRA".
Mr Adams, after his first face to face meeting with Mr Murphy since his appointment last week as Northern Ireland Secretary, said the IRA statement was yet another indication "of the seriousness of the situation".
"You had the political institutions in place which were seen by many as the political anchor and the most visible sign of this process. They are gone.
"You had the IRA, which has been involved in a whole series of initiatives and in talks with the IICD (Independent International Commission on Decommissioning). That's gone.
"I don't want to, on the one hand, exaggerate the difficulties but they are quite profound and it isn't about trust. "It's about the working mechanisms that we agreed and the template or the charter that we agreed not being defended, not being protected, not being nourished, not being promoted.
"And so we have a British government on the back of an Ulster Unionist Council proposal coming in to stand down the institutions and all that has flowed from that since has to be seen as a sign of the difficulties that we are in."
Mr Adams, who was accompanied at the meeting by Sinn Fein chief negotiator Martin McGuinness, Dara O'Hagan and Mary Lou McDonald, said that in setting the demand for the IRA to disband, he believed the bar for Republicans had been set too high.