Britannia Radio

IRA dissidents pose rising threat in N.Ireland

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK – 6 hours ago

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) —

Irish Republican Army splinter groups are launching more attacks in Northern Ireland than at any time in recent years, and are increasingly trying to kill police officers, international experts said in a report published Monday.
The IRA renounced violence and disarmed in 2005 after killing nearly 1,800 people in a failed 1970-97 effort to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. But breakaway groups are trying to keep alive that campaign of violence and undermine the central achievement of Northern Ireland's peace process: a power-sharing government that unites British Protestants with the Irish Catholics of Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party.
The report said one splinter group, called the Real IRA, badly wounded one police officer by detonating a bomb under his private car in May; firebombed four businesses; tried to recruit disillusioned members of the mainstream IRA; and "continued to seek to obtain weapons from associates, criminals and from overseas as well as by manufacturing them itself."
And it said another, the Continuity IRA, tried twice in recent months to blow up police patrols near the border. The group planted a remote-controlled bomb under a small bridge in June, and fired rocket-propelled grenades containing Semtex plastic explosive in August. In both cases, the homemade devices failed to detonate fully.
The British and Irish governments said their security forces were cooperating closely to suppress the activities of splinter groups, which are concentrated along the 300-mile (500-kilometer) border dividing Northern Ireland, which is a British territory, and the Republic of Ireland.
But the Independent Monitoring Commission — an international panel that reports to both governments on the activities of Northern Ireland paramilitary groups — said the Real IRA and Continuity IRA had been especially active since May. The commission includes former chiefs of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Scotland Yard's anti-terror unit.
The experts said IRA dissidents — those who dissent from the IRA's conversion to peaceful politics — were behind "a more concentrated period of attacks than at any time since we started to report on them 4 1/2 years ago."
The experts said the two major dissident groups also were meting out so-called "punishment" attacks against criminal rivals and others in the Catholic community.
The IRA stopped such non-lethal, maiming attacks — in which the victim's limbs typically are broken or shot at point-blank range — as part of its 2005 peace commitments.
The experts said one of the dissidents' recent 13 "punishment" victims was a Sinn Fein member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.