Adams, a reputed IRA commander since the mid-1970s, said his party delegation pressed in vain for Ahern to unveil evidence of Sinn Fein complicity. "We asked him to stand up those accusations, and he could not stand them up," Adams said outside Ahern's Government Buildings headquarters in Dublin.
Reporters asked Adams whether Ahern had mentioned confidential police intelligence -- involving surveillance of Sinn Fein and IRA officials or wiretaps of their telephone conversations -- that would back his accusation that Sinn Fein knew of the robbery plans.
"There can be no intelligence or no evidence, because we simply didn't have any knowledge," Adams said.
Ahern also met with separate delegations from two other Northern Ireland parties: the Irish Catholics of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, and the British Protestants of the Ulster Unionist Party.
Those two moderate parties once led a joint Catholic-Protestant administration, the central objective of Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace accord of 1998. But the coalition collapsed in 2002 amid arguments over continued IRA activities.
Since then Northern Ireland voters have made hard-line parties the dominant voices: Sinn Fein on the Catholic side, and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists on the Protestant side.
Ahern and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain spent the past year trying to coax Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists into a new power-sharing agreement, but the proposed deal required the IRA to disarm fully and cease all activities.
Instead, the IRA rejected Democratic Unionist demands for any disarmament acts to be photographed -- and then, according to police and both the British and Irish governments, launched the raid on Northern Bank.
The fallout has all but destroyed any hope of reviving power-sharing this year, and sharpened demands for the IRA to renounce all threatening activities -- effectively to disband.
