Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness today dismissed allegations that he was a British spy and said he was convinced no evidence could be produced to support the claim.
Martin McGuinness:
In his first public appearance since the allegations surfaced in the Dublin-based tabloid newspaper the Sunday World, the Mid Ulster MP described the claims that he worked for MI6 as "hooey".
The former Stormont Education Minister also accused elements within the Democratic Unionist Party of being behind the allegations against him.
Mr McGuinness said after a meeting of his Assembly group: "I am a thousand, I am a million per cent confident no one will ever produce anything against me.
"I have worked all of my adult life as an Irish republican. Many of my comrades have been killed. Many IRA volunteers have been killed and I, of course, knew many of them as many of you well know.
"Under no circumstances will I ever be concerned about anybody throwing anything up at me which will strike against me. It is not even a remote possibility," he said.
The allegations against Mr McGuinness were made by former army intelligence handler Martin Ingram, who exposed Belfast republican Freddie Scappaticci as the British agent "Stakeknife", who operated at the heart of the IRA.
Mr Scappaticci denied the allegations but later fled his west Belfast home.
Mr Ingram's claim, which was published in the Sunday World, followed the unmasking by Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams last December of the party's head of administration at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, as a spy.
Mr Donaldson admitted that he had spied on republican colleagues in a confession broadcast on RTÉ and later went into hiding. He was murdered in April in a remote cottage in Glenties in Co Donegal.
Sinn Féin has rubbished Mr Ingram's claims, which are based on a transcript published on Sunday of a conversation allegedly between Mr McGuinness and an MI6 handler.
"They are total and absolute nonsense and they are hooey of the worst kind. Now you would need to have nerves of steel to be part of a Sinn Féin leadership which has had to take the sort of muck and abuse thrown at us over the course of many years, but we are in positions of leadership," Mr McGuinness.
"We are not going to be distracted. We are not going to be deflected and ultimately we are going to work through, and I think our people have a very real sense that that is the case."
PA