Report: IRA dissidents pose threat to N.Ireland

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK Associated Press Writer

DUBLIN (AP) - Irish Republican Army dissidents pose their greatest security threat in Northern Ireland since the province's peace accord 11 years ago and are being helped by a handful of IRA veterans in plotting attacks, an expert panel said Wednesday.

The Independent Monitoring Commission, which reports regularly on the underground activities of Northern Ireland's myriad paramilitary groups, said dissidents backed by a small number of mainstream IRA members are responsible for a surge in violence since March.

These include the fatal shootings of two British soldiers and a policeman; several failed attempts to kill security-force members with bombs in vehicles and on roadsides; and wounding 20 people in a campaign to deter civilians - particularly within the IRA's Catholic power bases - from cooperating with the security forces.

The experts, who include former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Kerr and former Scotland Yard anti-terror chief John Grieve, have filed reports on paramilitary violence to the British and Irish governments since 2003.

They said the two major splinter groups, the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, both have pursued heightened levels of recruitment, training and weapons smuggling from March to August, the period scrutinized in their report.

"The seriousness, range and tempo of their activities all changed for the worse in these six months," they wrote.

But they said the biggest new threat came from experienced veterans of the main IRA faction, the Provisionals, who have been giving the dissidents technical and tactical help in defiance of their group's 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm.

The experts emphasized, however, that Provisional IRA leaders were focused on keeping rank-and-file veterans in line and identifying members collaborating with the breakaway factions.

They noted that the dissidents' main political objective was to undermine Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party that is the major Irish Catholic player in Northern Ireland's 2 1/2-year-old power-sharing government with British Protestants.

Dissident IRA violence "is an attack on the peaceful political approach adopted by Sinn Fein and is designed to affect policing and to raise public fears about security," the experts concluded.

The IRA killed about 1,775 people, including 300 police officers, during its failed 1970-1997 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. The dissidents have failed to mount anything close to that relentless campaign of violence in the years since 1998, when Sinn Fein leaders accepted the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord that envisioned power-sharing as the best way to promote compromise and reconciliation.

Four months after that landmark pact, the Real IRA committed the deadliest bombing of the entire Northern Ireland conflict: the car-bomb attack on Omagh that killed 28 people, mostly women and children. It has killed only a handful of people since.

Wednesday's report said the Real IRA and its Continuity IRA rivals have increasingly cooperated when planning attacks on the police since mid-2008. The experts said both factions specifically were training members in the manufacture and use of explosives.

They said the best strategy for isolating the dissidents would be to transfer responsibility for Northern Ireland's justice system from Britain to the power-sharing coalition in Belfast. Sinn Fein and the governments of Britain, Ireland and United States all support the move but Protestant leaders are blocking it.

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On the Net:

Report, http://tinyurl.com/yjbfvpe