Although lists of the weapons supposed to be contained in two dumps inspected and sealed by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning have been drawn up and published in the media, using police and security sources, the exact number and type of weapons is known only to those directly involved.
The IRA appointed two senior figures to liaise with the international commission and also to liaise with its quartermaster, a Co Cavan man, and his staff.
The IRA quartermaster has had control of a network of bunkers stretching across this State but thought to be concentrated in the Cavan-Meath-Louth area and then further south in the Limerick-north Kerry-north Tipperary area.
The dumps in the south-west were used to hide the bulk of the arms shipments which were given to the Provisional IRA by Col Moamar Gadafy, the Libyan leader, who was also the IRA's sponsor in the 1970s and 1980s. If the arms inspectors saw intact dumps containing a large amount of untouched infantry weaponry, it is still possible that these are located in the south-west.
At least 300 tonnes of weapons, including six tonnes of the plastic explosive Semtex, were smuggled into the State in four shipments between 1984 and 1986. Most was secreted in dumps in the southwest but many weapons were quickly moved north for use with the IRA's "active" units in Northern Ireland.
The Garda estimated that about half of the six tonnes of Semtex was used in IRA attacks between the 1980s and up to the summer of 1997, when it called its second and final ceasefire. This leaves around three tonnes of this explosive.
It has a shelf life of more than 30 years but may have been 10 years old by the time the Provisional IRA received it, so it is coming to the end of its safe life and may have to be destroyed or otherwise disposed of.
There is no indication that the IRA is prepared to allow State forces, particularly the Defence Forces' Ordnance Section, to dispose of this potentially very dangerous explosive.
The firearms are standard infantry issue and there is thought to be enough to arm a force of about battalion strength of about 600 soldiers.
This estimate was originally arrived at based on intelligence garda∅ gathered at the time of the seizure of the Eksund gun-running ship in 1987.
The crew was arrested by French police after the ship was intercepted in the Bay of Biscay by a French customs vessel that suspected it might be involved in drug-running. garda∅ travelled to Paris and questioned the IRA men and the privateer captain, Adrian Hopkins.
Garda∅ elicited information from their interviews which gave an accurate picture of what had reached Ireland from Libya over the previous three years.
There may have been 2,000 AK47 rifles in total, and smaller numbers of medium and heavy Russian-manufactured machineguns. There were dozens of RPG7 anti-tank rockets, as many as 600 pistols and up to six SAM7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles.
The IRA test-fired two of the SAM7 missiles but was not supplied with the proper instruction manuals and could not master the weapon.
Although most of the weapons were in pristine condition, they did not fit in with the military strategy adopted by the IRA from the mid-1980s onwards. The infantry weapons would only be of use if the IRA were to mount an open, frontal assault on the British army and security bases in the North. The IRA realised it could not win such a war and would, in fact, be substantially destroyed if it tried.
Therefore the bulk of the Libyan arms were placed in dry, safe dumps, where they could be kept for a long period and retrieved in the event of some doomsday scenario.
By the late 1980s the IRA's military strategy switched entirely to hit-and-run attacks on the security forces in Northern Ireland and large-scale bomb attacks on commercial targets in the North and in England. Semtex came to be central to the IRA's military strategy.
It set up small, portable factories and began manufacturing its own rockets, grenades and "booster charges" for the big bombs, known as "smokies". Semtex is a highly malleable explosive and the IRA's engineering department began dissolving it to remove the plasticine-like substance into powder, which was then poured into drip tubing.
This was then coiled into home-made explosive mixture made from a ground fertiliser and sugar mix to make bombs as powerful as any being used by military forces around the world.
By the early 1990s, the IRA had become self-sufficient in arms and needed only to import "clean" handguns for use in assassinations. It was even able to manufacture its own version of the Barrett .5 sniper rifle, which it used to kill up to nine members of the security forces in the Border area.
Security sources yesterday pointed out that while the weapons dumps which had been inspected and closed or destroyed were not central to its military campaign, the effective surrender of these weapons marked a major departure in IRA thinking.
Up to this point, the IRA had refused any gesture towards decommissioning. In one statement in March 1997 it said there would be "no surrender of IRA weapons under any circumstances and to anyone".