New IRA? Old Problems?

“Let us not waste our energies brooding over the more we might have got.  Let us look upon what it is we have got.”

Michael Collins, Irish Independence leader speaking about the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty

Irish Nationalism as an ideology has always been about it’s followers having to face divisions between their high hopes and political reality.  Michael Collins, the Irish Republican and independence leader was the first to confront this dilemma and was ultimately killed by it.  He argued that accepting the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, while it fell short of the outright independence and Irish unity that he and his compatriots had fought for, was a foundation for greater freedom to be achieved.  It was ironically his main opponent in the Irish Civil War, Eamon De Valera, who after Collins’ death proved him right by taking back the treaty ports leased to the British by diplomacy and made the Irish Free State a republic by constitutional change.  But the Republic of Ireland and it’s leaders came to the eventual, if reluctant, realisation that complete Irish unity between the north and south was a long way off to being achieved.

Much like the time during the time of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, when the 1998 Belfast Agreement  was signed and ratified many Irish Republicans consented to the will of democratic process and laid down their arms.  However a minority chose to fight on with the aim of uniting the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland with the 6 of Northern Ireland, despite the Irish Constitution under the terms of the Belfast Agreement disavowing territorial claims to the north.  These rebels against the Belfast Agreement are known as “dissident” republicans and carry on their paramilitary activity to this day.

For much of Northern Ireland’s post-Belfast Agreement history paramilitary activity behind the scenes in the province had been simmering behind the scenes, but nowhere near the levels of the horrors of The Troubles period.  Unionist suspicion of Sinn Fein and their alleged links to paramilitary groups remained, but the party nevertheless consistently and vocally denounced instances of such activity when they broke out into open violence.  However changes in the fortunes and politics of dissident republicans means that the British Home Office has recently taken the position of publicly acknowledging them as more of a threat to national security.

On the week ending the 9^th May the Home Office publicly declared that the threat from a possible dissident republican terrorist attack has increased from “moderate” to “substantial”.  This is largely because of the emergence in recent years of a dissident republican group popularly known as the” New IRA”.  The New IRA was formed in July 2012 as a new group consisting of elements from Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), the Real IRA and other miscellaneous dissident-minded individuals.  The former is a vigilante group whose professed mission of violently opposing drug dealers hails from a tradition started in the “Free Derry” era of The Troubles.  This new alignment of dissident groups only leaves the Continuity IRA as the only major organised dissident entity left, although commentators say this group is in decline due to it being riddled with informers.

The New IRA is thought to have a strong presence in West Belfast and Derry  but also operates in areas such as Tyrone, mid-Ulster and Fermanagh.  It’s leadership includes a former member of the East Tyrone Provisional IRA, an area infamously known by the British Army “Bandit Country”.  The groups attacks centre on gun and bomb attacks.  The latter was instigated in March against a prison officer Adrian Ismay who was killed by a car bomb.  This is a chilling reminder of some of the worst days of The Troubles when in revenge for authorities defying Provisional IRA hunger strikers, the group targeted prison officers and brutally murdered them.  An increase in paramilitary style assaults, by republicans and loyalists have been increasingly evident in the news in Northern Ireland in recent months.  One of the New IRA’s gruesome calling cards is the “Six-pack”, the shooting of joints in the arms and legs.  According to statistics from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), 52 bomb attacks across Northern Ireland in the past 12 months compared with 36 the previous year.

The British security services believe that what makes the New IRA especially dangerous in addition to their willingness to use violence is their arsenal.  These services believe that the IRA has managed to acquire approximately a quarter of a ton of Semtex which is a plastic explosive originally manufactured in former Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.  This stock was sent to the Provisional IRA by the late former leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi in his efforts to destabilise the West through his sponsorship of various terror groups.  Semtex was originally used as a so called “booster” by the Provisional IRA to set off larger chemical-fertiliser bombs such as the devastating bomb detonated in the London Docklands in the 1990s.  The location of this particular stash of explosives, which was hidden in County Cavan in the Republic of Ireland, was unknown to the Provisional IRA group that participated in the arms decommissioning, but known to a man who became a dissident republican and eventually joined the IRA.  The security services also worry that former Provisional IRA men, who are members of the New IRA, may use their engineering expertise to somehow use the Semtex to make armour-piercing weapons, which in all likelihood may make the group more willing to take the fight directly to the security services themselves, in addition to softer civilian targets.

What can be done?  For a start the UK Government can act on the recommendations of the former governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten who called for the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to be increased from it’s current standing force of 6,500 to have 600 more additional officers.  At the same time a careful eye will have to be kept on public perceptions about the force, to avoid the poisonous public relations that surrounded it’s predecessor the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).  Sinn Fein denials about the links between many of it’s member and past paramilitary activity is playing fast and loose with the truth to the extreme.  And yet the Unionists must resist the temptation to use the party as a political punch back when it should instead welcome it’s condemnations of dissident republican activity.  As former supporters of the armed struggle, their calls for peace are all the more meaningful, and the Unionists should seek to encourage them to hold to their commitments as oppose to goading them.  It also has to be said that the Unionists have to eat some humble pie since while they wax lyrical about the failure of republican paramilitaries to disarm, a recent UK Parliamentary report clearly cites the Loyalist paramilitaries as a least as well armed as their opposite numbers.

The people and politicians should take their advice from the Torah; “living well is the best revenge”.  If a stable and prosperous Northern Ireland is built in spite of the dangers then that will be the ultimate victory over terrorism.  It also has to be remembered that as bad as dissident republicans are, the group most likely to attack the UK is still the Islamic State.  That challenge ultimately will require a deeper commitment of resources and determination to overcome.