The Northern Ireland Minister for Education Mr Martin McGuinness today launched a stinging attack on Northern Secretary Dr John Reid, accusing him of being a threat to the Belfast Agreement.
Mr McGuinness said Dr Reid had in his short time in Belfast moved away from the Agreement and "significantly closer" to the position of unionists.
He was moving closer to the policy approach adopted by former British Prime Minister Mr John Major, which Mr McGuinness said had brought down the first IRA ceasefire and which he said British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair had discarded as "unworkable and counter-productive".
Mr McGuinness, writing in Ireland on Sunday, accused Dr Reid of dishonesty, and charged him of effectively demanding an IRA surrender.
He also said recent comments by the Northern Secretary on Northern Ireland First Minister Mr David Trimble's ban on Sinn Fein ministers attending North-South ministerial meetings, because of the IRA's failure to decommission its weapons, made it appear Dr Reid blamed republicans.
"A strategy for blame is a wrecker's strategy," said Mr McGuinness. "Is this really where Mr Reid wants to take the situation?"
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He claimed Dr Reid had been "dishonest" in a recent US newspaper interview in which he said: "Sinn Fein still has a gun under the table."
Mr McGuinness said: "This open and unapologetic use of a unionist argument and language again sets Reid in behind the Trimble line."
Dr Reid was falsely accusing Sinn Fein of being an armed organisation as "a camouflage for ignoring the democratic entitlements of the Sinn Fein electorate and the UUP's breach of the agreement," he claimed.
The Northern Secretary was "demanding the commencement of an IRA surrender as a precondition to David Trimble honouring his obligations under the terms of the Agreement" reinstating Mr McGuinness and Northern Ireland's Minister for Health Ms Bairbre de Brun to meetings with their Dublin counterparts.
Mr McGuinness said Dr Reid was "blithely ignoring" the fact that the British Government had failed to honour a deal made with the IRA last May and reneged on its commitments to implement fully the Patten Report on policing reforms and demilitarisation.
"Mr Reid, like David Trimble, is attempting to renegotiate the Agreement; to resurrect preconditions which a Tory government erected as a deliberate and effective block on progress," he claimed.
The Agreement could not succeed unless all parties to it honoured their commitments and obligations, he said, insisting Sinn Fein had done so and "stretched out membership and constituency very considerably in the course of this".
There was no immediate comment from the Northern Ireland Office.
PA