Government attempts to tone down the bitter public exchanges with Sinn Féin will be tested this week by renewed criticism of the provisional republican movement from the International Monitoring Commission and in the Dáil.
The Cabinet will tomorrow consider a new report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC) which is believed to blame the IRA for the Northern Bank raid. The report, which is to be made public on Thursday, is expected to recommend sanctions against Sinn Féin.
The weekly Cabinet meeting will also decide whether to support a Fine Gael Private Members' Motion, to be debated in the Dáil tomorrow and voted upon on Wednesday. The motion calls on the IRA to decommission all its weapons and end criminal activity. It will be supported from speakers from the main opposition parties, and possibly from the Government parties, who will be highly critical of both Sinn Féin and the IRA.
Both the Taoiseach and Minister for Foreign Affairs have spoken of the need to move forward, with Mr Dermot Ahern saying it was a time for "cool heads".
Yesterday the Sinn Féin president, Mr Gerry Adams, also urged all participants in the political process "to calm down, to think about the future, to get over whatever hurt or perceived hurt there is over this row" and to get the peace process back on track.
He made these apparently conciliatory remarks the day after he said the British and Irish governments "need to dig their heads out of their asses".
The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, suggested all parties should "heed what Archbishop Brady said and that is not to use confrontational language, inflammatory language and abusive language of that kind".
He said "the provisional movement have to now address serious issues around decommissioning, paramilitarism and criminality", and being abusive about members of the Government and the Government itself did not help.
In an interview yesterday on RTÉ's This Week, Mr Adams said Sinn Féin's position was that it was not going to interpret IRA statements. He did not suggest that this was because of any differences within the republican movement, but because Sinn Féin's past willingness to interpret what the IRA said had been "used and abused".
He said: "Sinn Féin will not be accountable for the IRA, and Sinn Féin especially will not be held accountable for alleged activity by the IRA. You have this bank robbery nonsense - the truth is nobody knows who did the bank robbery except the people who did it."
The British government must decide after the IMC report is published whether to impose sanctions on Sinn Féin arising from the expected finding that the IRA robbed the Northern Bank. The most likely sanction would be a cut in salaries paid to Sinn Féin members of the Northern Assembly.
Mr McDowell yesterday repeated the Government's view that such sanctions would be "a side show The Taoiseach and myself have discussed this at length, that one of the problems with imposing sanctions on the IRA is that it is purely symbolic, and they take advantage of these symbolic sanctions to claim that they are being discriminated against and to go further into victim mode."
It was a distraction from the attempt to get them to face up to their own problems, he said.
He said he did not accept the picture often painted of the Sinn Féin leadership as being a "conduit to harder-line people".
"The Provisionals have a single set of beliefs. That set of beliefs involves the rather fanciful view, but it is the one held by all of them, that the army council is the supreme lawful authority on this island. As long as they are stuck in that mind set and that time warp they have a serious problem."