What's Behind Northern Ireland's Latest Killing Spree?*

By Catherine Mayer / London Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009
Time Magazine

"A good husband has been taken away from me, and my life has been
destroyed. And what for? A piece of land that my husband is only going
to get six feet of." Thus the anguished words of Kate Carroll, widow of
police officer Stephen Carroll who was murdered on March 9, in what
appears to be a revival of the political violence that killed some 3,500
civilians, soldiers, police and paramilitaries over three decades in
Northern Ireland.

Until the shooting of officer Carroll, and the double slaying at an
Antrim barracks two nights earlier of British soldiers Sapper Mark
Quinsey and Sapper Patrick Azimkar, it had appeared that Northern
Ireland's lengthy peace process had succeeded in ending the violent
conflict known locally as The Troubles. Carroll was the first policeman
to be killed by Northern Irish terrorists in over a decade. "I had begun
to take the process for granted and to regard the peace as
irreversible," says Lord Bew, Professor of Irish Politics at Queen's
University Belfast and a legislator in Britain's upper house. "I was
shocked to death [by the killings]," says Belfast native Jim McNally, as
he strolls along the city's Falls Road with his partner. "I just think
it's awful. I don't think people were expecting it." (See pictures of
Belfast at peace)

The violence was greeted with revulsion in both Catholic and Protestant
communities, and was condemned by all of Northern Ireland's major
political parties, both unionist and nationalist.

Two suspects, one aged just 17, have already been arrested in connection
with Carroll's murder, and investigators say they are making progress in
tracking down the killers of Sappers Quinsey and Azimkar. But the
toughest detective work may lie in determining why violence has flared
again.

A first clue comes in the bewildering slew of acronyms that clog up
every discussion of the situation. RIRA — the self-styled Real IRA — has
said that it killed the soldiers; CIRA — Continuity IRA — laid claim to
gunning down Carroll. Factional splits and bloody internecine feuds were
long a feature of the covert paramilitary republican movement, and RIRA
and CIRA are dissident groups dedicated to destabilizing the peace
process. Both groups are breakaways from the Provisional IRA, which,
together with its political wing, Sinn Fein, have embraced power-sharing
in Northern Ireland and renounced violence. The dissidents accuse them
of compromising on the movement's original goal of ending Britain's hold
on the territory and reuniting it with the Republic of Ireland. They
target the security forces of the British and devolved Northern Irish
governments, but their greatest anger is reserved for their former
comrades who have made peace.

The Provisional IRA, the largest and deadliest of the Republican
paramilitary organizations, declared a cease-fire in 1997 and formally
ended its armed campaign in 2005. Sinn Fein has transformed itself from
a fringe party to the dominant political party in the Catholic
community, and the second-largest in Northern Ireland. Former IRA leader
Martin McGuinness serves as Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland's
devolved government. "I supported the IRA during the conflict, I myself
was a member of the IRA but that war is over," said McGuinness, in a
strong condemnation of the renewed violence. "[The dissidents] are
clearly signaling that they want to resume or restart that war. I deny
their right to do that."

Although Sinn Fein is firmly wedded to the political process, some
Republicans still accept the old twin-track approach of combining the
bullet and the ballot. "I recognise the Irish people have an absolute
right to take up arms against British rule," says Richard Walsh, the
spokesman for one such party, Republican Sinn Fein. Walsh says support
for the dissidents is growing. "It's inevitable that more people are
becoming disillusioned with the Provisionals. They've been lying to
their own people for decades now. The traditional base [is] deserting
them ever since they decided to recognize the British state and endorse
British rule in Ireland."

Despite Walsh's claims, there has been little sign of a migration away
from the mainstream Sinn Fein. A Republican Sinn Fein candidate who ran
against McGuinness in the 2007 Northern Irish Assembly elections
garnered just 437 first preference votes, to McGuinness' 8,065. But in
the past year, intelligence and monitoring organizations have picked up
signs of increasing activity among dissident Republican paramilitary groups.

"There have been substantial attempts to recruit but our view was that
until now this was not a massive increase in membership," says Lord
Alderdice, who serves on the Independent Monitoring Commission which
evaluates intelligence on paramilitary activity. "We've not been talking
about substantial organizations." A security source concurs, saying the
threat emanates from "a relatively small number of individuals," in
groups that may be harder to detect because they "are fragmented and
geographically segmented." Sinn Fein has called on its Republican
supporters to assist the police in combating the dissidents' efforts to
reignite violence in Northern Ireland. And that has been welcomed by the
party's longtime opponents. Because many of the dissidents are former
members of the Provisional IRA, the Republican community, including its
political leaders, is more likely to have crossed paths with them in the
past. "If you're talking about seasoned terrorists, which some of these
dissidents seem to be, there's no better source than Sinn Fein itself,"
says Alex Kane, Director of Communications for the Ulster Unionist Party.

But for now, authorities are expecting further attacks by dissidents.
Could such a campaign of violence destabilize the peace? "The
[dissidents] have the advantage of a reasonably proximate objective,
which is that they will create tensions that will eventually bring the
[Northern Ireland] Assembly down. I do not think they will succeed in
that," says Lord Bew. He adds the caveat, "unless there is a
particularly wild reaction from Loyalists." Police and security services
are braced against the possibility of reprisals by Protestant
paramilitary organizations.

The deeper threat to peace, though, may be found in impoverished areas
that never benefited from the territory's so-called "peace dividend,"
and are hardest hit by the vertiginous decline of the economy. Such
places used to be no-go areas for the police, and were effectively
controlled by paramilitaries. Eighteen-year-old Sinead Kelly waits for
her partner outside a betting shop on the Falls Road, a working-class
Republican stronghold. "It's frightening around here at night," she
says. "I can't even walk down the street with my baby, I'm that scared
in case I meet people with drugs." Her startling conclusion: "I would
rather have lived in those days when it was the Troubles," she says. Too
young to remember first hand the horrors inflicted in the name of a
reunited Ireland — or of preserving the Union — she knows that the
paramilitaries used to mete out summary justice to the kinds of petty
criminals and thugs that scare her. Social deprivation has always been
the best recruiting sergeant for terrorism.

—With reporting by Bryan Coll/Belfast