The Minister for Justice has said Sinn Féin and the IRA are not republican, dismissing their claim that the IRA derives a mandate from the 1918 election as political and historical "drivel".
In the latest of a series of attacks on Sinn Féin and the IRA, Mr McDowell said yesterday: "Their methods aren't republican, their attitudes aren't republican, they are not now in my view exhibiting any republican characteristics.
"Let us be clear about what they actually are. It's an armed movement with a political wing. It's a movement which will stoop to any methods to achieve its results. It is engaging in crime in the Republic, it's engaging in smuggling, racketeering, and blackmail to fund itself. The republicans of 1916, 1921, 1922 and 1923 never did those things."
Speaking on RTÉ's This Week programme, he said that while republicans in the past engaged in violence, "they didn't behave in a manner in which the modern republicans are doing. They didn't take out youngsters and break their legs with baseball bats.They didn't shoot people in the knee joints, they didn't organise crime in the city of Dublin with common criminals and extort money from them. That's what's going on at the moment."
He said there are no parallels between the situation in 1916 and the years immediately after and the circumstances in which the modern-day Sinn Féin and IRA now find themselves.
"The independent Irish State has been established. The 1918 election did not give a mandate to the army council of the IRA to do anything. That's a total myth. I'm sorry to say it's drivel in terms of political and historical truth.
"The modern Irish State is the Republic. There is only one Republic - it is the one established by the Irish people, and the Irish people in a sovereign act North and South have both established the Good Friday agreement as the way forward, an agreement to which, by the way, the Provisional movement has never signed up fully. You never hear the IRA saying that the principle of majority consent in Northern Ireland is valid, which is a cornerstone of that agreement."
Mr McDowell said the great majority of people on the island knew that the way forward is the Good Friday agreement. While unionist intransigence over power sharing was an obstacle, "another enormous problem is the refusal of the Provisional movement in its entirety to unambiguously say there is no further room for paramilitarism."
He said he looked forward to a united Ireland, organised along republican principles. "I am willing to see it happen by stages because I think that just clicking your fingers and having a unitary all-Ireland Republic the day after tomorrow or in five or six years time is not likely to happen. But I do believe that there is an immense logic in favour of a united Ireland - a nation of six million people which was genuinely a Republic in which the orange and green meant something, in which there was fraternity between them would play a much stronger role in the European Union."