Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte has attacked a new campaign by Sinn Féin to end partition, saying it could inflame the already volatile sectarian climate in the North.
In an address to the party's Louth constituency selection convention in Drogheda yesterday, Mr Rabbitte said Sinn Féin and the republican movement shared a responsibility for creating the climate in which sectarian divisions flourished.
Actions such as the new 'Make Partition History' campaign were "calculated to increase the trend towards inter-communal hostility which makes power-sharing within Northern Ireland difficult if not impossible. They show that Sinn Féin's real interest was never in bedding down the Good Friday agreement." Mr Rabbitte also said the key problem in the North did not relate to political institutions, but to the deep sectarian divisions that had become even more entrenched since the Belfast agreement.
Unionist and loyalist politicians not only failed to sell the Belfast Agreement as providing protection for their views and outlook, but "seem to have learned the trick of how to turn on the tap of sectarian-based violence, but have no idea how to turn it off".
"Unionist and loyalist leaders - not to speak of the leaders of the laughingly self-proclaimed 'loyal' institutions - may not personally direct riots, street protest, arson and vandalism, but they know how to turn on the heat," he said.
"They are feeding the flames of a conflict that is, in its basis, nakedly sectarian."