ANALYSIS:Arrests are on the rise North and South, but that is no reason for complacency, writes GERRY MORIARTY
JUST READING news and court reports in this paper will tell you that the Garda, the PSNI and MI5 are enjoying some success in tackling the dissident republican paramilitary threat. This time last year there were an estimated 80-100 dissidents serving prison sentences on both sides of the Border. That number is growing.
The bomb factory uncovered in Co Louth on Saturday and the two arrests demonstrated that, as respective justice ministers Dermot Ahern and David Ford asserted, there is genuine co-operation between the security and intelligence services operating on this island.
It is clear, too, by the numbers of people being arrested and charged – and there was a further high-profile charging of an alleged dissident in Newry court yesterday – that there is reasonable if not considerable penetration of the dissident groupings.
Joe Brosnan of the Independent Monitoring Commission, a former chief civil servant in the Republic’s Department of Justice, acknowledged those achievements yesterday at the publication of the IMC’s 23rd report. Another commissioner, John Grieve, a former senior officer in the London Metropolitan Police, said that there were more alleged dissidents arrested and charged so far this year than in the whole of last year in the North and South.
But, as usual, the proviso was that there could be no cause for complacency. Bottom line, as Brosnan also acknowledged, the dissidents remained “highly active and dangerous”. And in the past 12 months they have been at their most menacing. They don’t have any political purchase, but they’re not seeking any. Their purpose is to undermine the political process. They killed two British soldiers and a PSNI officer in March last year and their concentration is on killing more.
Last year Terry Spence, head of the North’s Police Federation, the PSNI’s representative body, said had the dissident republicans succeeded to “maximum effect” with their gun, bomb, rocket and mortar attacks 40 police officers would have been killed over the previous 12 months.
The dissidents remain focused on killing police officers. They murdered Constable Stephen Carroll in Craigavon, Co Armagh, in March last year while in January Constable Peadar Heffron, a Catholic, GAA player and Irish speaker, was badly injured in a car bombing, an attack that resulted in the amputation of his right leg.
The IMC report covers the six months from September to February this year, and does not include the car bomb attack close to the MI5 building and British army base in Holywood, Co Down, last month. But in that six months the Real IRA alone was involved in 16 attacks on police officers, PSNI premises or those associated with or related to the officers.
There is a new dispensation that is settling down well in Northern Ireland but the dissidents are consciously trying to shake its political foundations. A number of real and hoax bomb and gun attacks, particularly in areas such as south Armagh, have resulted in public criticism of the dissidents, but also of the police.
People have expressed annoyance, sometimes outrage, that the police have been slow in responding to some alerts. Last month it fell to the local fire service to cordon off the area and evacuate vulnerable people because it took so long for the police to arrive at a bomb scene outside Newtownhamilton PSNI station in south Armagh.
Commissioner Grieve said it was a dilemma for the police but it was proper that they be cautious. Dissidents were often seeking to lure police officers to such scenes. The dissidents were causing problems on two fronts: endangering police officers and also putting them on the back foot by causing them to be so cautious in some situations that it could lead to public disaffection.
Overall Grieve and Brosnan were at pains neither to over- or under-emphasise the threat. Certainly, as Grieve said, they “were not in the same league at all” in terms of the death and damage that the Provisional IRA caused. But regardless of the growing numbers of dissidents serving in Irish prisons, it was also clear that they could attract recruits to carry on the violence.