DUP Finance Minister Arlene Foster has said Martin McGuinness's comments about her party's failure to implement the Stormont House Agreement "plumb new depths of hypocrisy".
The Sinn Féin deputy first minister made the remarks in a platform piece in The Irish News yesterday.
Although the British government was the main focus of Mid Ulster MLA's criticism, he did appear to lay blame for failure to implement the pre-Christmas deal with his party's main partners in government.
"The failure of the DUP to implement the Stormont House Agreement and the additional cuts announced by the Tories in July will seriously impact on frontline services, on our economy and on society," Mr McGuinness said.
But Mrs Foster said the remarks were "devoid of any substantive arguments".
"Sinn Féin have now resorted to claims of such ridiculousness they would be laughable were the consequences not so serious for the people of Northern Ireland," she said.
"The new depths of hypocrisy plumbed by such a claim demonstrate clearly where there is a need for the government at Westminster to act – the people of Northern Ireland deserve far better than such delusional comments."
The minister said republicans had been in a "tailspin" after Sinn Féin's national executive "forced the leadership into changing their position".
"Martin McGuinness’s trip to the United States similarly was a failure, so he has returned home and reduced himself to a local version of Comical Ali, making increasingly wild claims as every day another £312,000 is lost to public services here because of the stance taken by Sinn Féin and the SDLP," she said.
In his platform piece the deputy first minister described David Cameron's government as the "most disengaged" British administration he had ever dealt with.
The senior Sinn Féin representative warned that Stormont was "at the point of imminent collapse" and that his party has no further room for manoeuvre.
