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Christopher Walker: Dissident terrorists cast shadow over Ulster
DESPITE cross-community condemnation, denials that the peace process can be upset and the lack of explosives expertise shown by the failed 400lb car bomb outside the Policing Board headquarters near central Belfast at the weekend, there have been unmistakable signs that dissident republican terrorists from the Real and Continuity IRA groups are posing a growing threat in Northern Ireland.
Perhaps equally as disturbing as the increasing number of violent incidents is the hardening belief among security chiefs that the diehards may yet achieve their declared aim of mounting a Christmas "spectacular" and the evidence that the dissidents are driving a black market in smuggled goods along the twisting border with the Irish Republic that could swell their coffers by millions of pounds.
One source in the Irish police, the Garda, said that while the former Provisional IRA in South Armagh had concentrated on fuel smuggling, the groups now aligned with the dissidents are focusing on the tobacco and alcohol trade. Two recent shipments totalled 12 million cigarettes, with a street value of nearly 5m.
As those familiar with terrorist campaigns across the globe will be aware, the provision of finance for weaponry and explosives is almost as crucial as the recruitment of fighters and the training of experts like bomb makers. It has become clear in recent months that certain former Provisional IRA members disillusioned with the power-sharing regime entered into by Sinn Fein and Democratic Unionist Party have been helping them on an ad hoc basis.
As violence from Ulster returns with depressing familiarity to the headlines and news bulletins on the British mainland, the question frequently asked is exactly who and what are the two main organisations still waging the so-called "armed struggle," the Real IRA (RIRA) and the Continuity IRA (CIRA), plus the even more shadowy Oglaigh na hEireann, which roughly translates as "soldiers of Ireland" and confusingly, is also the Irish-language title for the Irish defence forces.
The Real IRA was born out of a split in the mainstream Provisional IRA (PIRA) in October, 1997, when the PIRA's so-called quartermaster-general resigned over the political wing, Sinn Fein's, determination under the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to pursue the peace process that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Shortly after its formation, the paramilitary group took over from the Continuity IRA as the leading refuge for dissidents from Ulster's minority Roman Catholic community. Its name was indelibly marked in blood when it carried out the single worst atrocity of the Troubles, the October, 1998 Omagh bombing that killed 29 people with a device nearly as large as that planted in Belfast last weekend.
It was also behind a string of subsequent attacks, including the bombing of the BBC Television Centre in west London in June, 2001, and the brutal murder in March this year of two British soldiers due to fly out to Afghanistan, sappers Mark Quinsey, 23, and Patrick Azimkar, 21, at Massarene Army base in Antrim.
Two days later, the Continuity IRA – which operates mainly in Counties Armagh and Fermanagh – shot and killed Police Service of Northern Ireland Constable Stephen Paul Carroll in Craigavon, County Armagh.
The CIRA had its origins in a split in the IRA which centred on opposition to republican candidates taking seats in the Dail, the Dublin-based Parliament of the Irish Republic. Its emergence on the terrorist scene dates back to 1996 when it destroyed a hotel in County Fermanagh with a bomb containing more than 1,200lb of explosives. There is growing evidence that, as the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), the body appointed by the British and Irish Governments to provide regular reports on paramilitary activity, reported recently, the two groups are now working much more closely together to increase the threat posed to the security forces. In its latest report, the IMC warned that the threat was now "very serious" and at its highest in six years.
The statistics speak for themselves, with more than 750 bomb alerts over the past two years and between March 1 and August 31 of this year, 11 attempts to kill PSNI officers, in addition to the murder of Constable Carroll. Thirty eight police officers and their families have moved home in the past two years after death threats. All of this is made the more disquieting when it is recalled that there are now more so-called "peace lines" separating the two communities than when the peace process was declared, and the Province's First Minister, DUP leader Peter Robinson, has just admitted for the first time that he cannot guarantee the future of the power-sharing structures.
The dissidents will only gain strength as long as the DUP and Sinn Fein remain at loggerheads over the devolution of policing and justice powers from Direct Rule ministers in London to local politicians.
Christopher Walker is a former Belfast correspondent of The Times.
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