Satardien blamed poor leadership by Islamic leaders and Irish government inaction for the radicalisation of young Muslims here. Speaking to the Sunday Tribune this weekend from his Dublin home, the wellrespected moderate cleric warned that a significant number of young Islamic men are now spending lengthy periods of the year travelling to and from the homelands of their parents, including Pakistan, where young western Muslims are dragged into al-Qaeda paramilitary training regimes.

"Irish Muslim leaders are failing our young people who are embracing fundamentalism. It is happening at a remarkable speed before our eyes. . . fascist fanaticism and radicalism is now rife amoung our young, " Satardien said.

"The true crisis in the Irish Muslim community is the failure of guidance from parents and from leaders. . . young Muslims here are being torn between two cultures, drawing them into support for terrorism, anti- semitism and a hatred of western democracy".

A growing sense of oppression among the Islamic community since the 7/7 London transport system bombings, in addition to ongoing crises in the Middle East, have inflamed radicalism among young Muslims here in the past 12 months, Satardien said. "There is an urgent need for the Irish government to introduce strict guidelines on foreign travel.

Young people [should not] go to foreign places where they are being brainwashed and where they are told to reject moderate Islam, " he added.

The Sunday Tribune has learned that the Supreme Muslim Council of Ireland provided a detailed briefing to officials at the Department of the Taoiseach as far back as September 2005 in relation to the increasing fanaticism of young Muslims. However, although department officials gave a committment to re-convene further meetings with the moderate council by March of this year, no further contact has been made. The Taoiseach's department has demonstrated "no interest" in the subject, said Satardien, who also called on the Irish authorities to monitor the activities of foreign national muslim religous leaders who are entering the country and who are promoting radical fundamentalism among young muslims.

Major questions have also arisen in relation to the capacity to detect chemical-based explosives at Irish airports, following last week's Heathrow bomb plot. A spokesperson for the Dublin Airport Authority would not provide any details on whether the airport's police have a chemical detection capacity in their sniffer-dog unit, when asked by the Sunday Tribune. It is understood that the customs unit at the airport do not presently have such a facility and the aquisition of such a specially trained dog would possibly take several months. Several security and geo-political experts have also this weekend warned that there is growing danger that Ireland could be used by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to launch attacks on the UK.

Security expert John Henry, director of Specialist Security Services, said "the whole threat against the world at the moment is based on US and UK troop movements and so there has to have been a risk attached to allowing US troops through Shannon airport."

The garda special detective unit (SDU) presently monitors the movements of "around three dozen" Islamic fundamentalists based here, including individuals originally from Chechnya and of Middle Eastern origin, according to informed sources.

US President George Bush yesterday said that the alleged plot to bomb planes flying from London to America showed that the threat of terror is still a very real one. Paraphrasing a famous IRA statement from the mid-1980s, Bush said, "this week's experience reminds us of a hard fact . . . the terrorists have to succeed only once to achieve their goal of mass murder, while we have to succeed every time to stop them".

Bush described the alleged plot as "well advanced" and said that it would have caused "death on a massive scale" if it had not been uncovered by UK intelligence experts.