They haven’t gone away, you know.
Or, as Jonny Byrne, senior lecturer in criminology at Ulster University, put it: “They’re still here.”
The “they” are dissident republicans, who police said it was “highly likely” were behind an attack on Lurgan police station, Co Armagh, late on Monday.
Two masked men, one armed with a gun, hijacked a “terrified” delivery driver, placed an object in the boot of his car and ordered him to drive it to the police station or he would be killed.
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It led to a “significant” security operation with around 100 homes evacuated and a controlled explosion carried out on what Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson said was “a crude but viable improvised explosive device”.
[ ‘Cowardly attack’: Delivery driver forced at gunpoint to bring explosive device to police station ]
The result, Byrne says, is: “We weren’t talking about them. Now we’re talking about them, it’s as simple as that.”
This is not a new tactic. In October 1990, in one notorious incident during the Troubles, the Provisional IRA tied Patsy Gillespie into a car containing a 453kg (1,000lb) bomb and forced him to drive it into a British army checkpoint in Derry. The explosion killed him and five soldiers.
Since the Belfast Agreement it has been used most often by dissident republicans – though occasionally by loyalists – yet, almost 30 years on from that peace deal, such throwbacks to Northern Ireland’s troubled past have become the exception rather than the norm.
The most recent set of statistics on the security situation, published by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) monthly, show that in the year to the end of February there were no security-related deaths and fewer shooting incidents, paramilitary-style attacks and paramilitary-style shootings – down to nine, 18 and two respectively – than in the previous 12 months.
The number of bombing incidents rose from five to 16, however.
Delivering his annual threat update last October, the director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, said Northern Ireland was “now living through the longest period without a national security attack since the start of the Troubles”.
“There has been a significant decrease in activity,” Byrne says.
This is due to multiple factors: recent security service successes have disrupted and diminished the capacity of the relatively small number of dissident republican groups such as the New IRA, the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA to mount attacks, while others have “just lost their appetite ... others may have moved on, or died”.
The Lurgan attack, he says, “feels opportunistic, and timed to Easter Monday”.
Naomi Long, the North’s Minister for Justice,told the BBC on Wednesday there was “no particular intelligence” to suggest more attacks were likely.
“There’s always an attempt in the run up to Easter for people to flex their muscle,” she said. “This just seems to be a very sad group of individuals who aren’t capable of moving on.”
Traditionally, Easter is a time of significance for republicans of all stripes; dissidents hold their commemorations on Monday, and the period has been associated with significant disorder.
In 2019, the journalist Lyra McKee was shot and killed in Derry early on Good Friday.
The Continuity IRA, which has its support base in the Lurgan area, is expected to hold a colour parade in the Kilwilkie estate – where the car used in the police station attack was hijacked – on Monday.
“What to all intents and purposes was a crude, very simplistic device,” Byrne says, is “still managing to create a very strong narrative”.
“It tells me that, in terms of the architecture of the peace process, in terms of embedding normalisation, we still have a way to go.”
