DISSIDENT REPUBLICAN paramilitary groups pose a “real and increasing security challenge in Northern Ireland” and could be planning attacks in Britain, MI5 chief Jonathan Evans has warned.
Mr Evans told security professionals there was a “persistent rise in terrorist activity and ambition in Northern Ireland over the last three years”. He said that so far this year dissidents had mounted over 30 attacks or attempted attacks on security targets in the North compared to over 20 attacks in the whole of last year.
Mr Evans said while dissidents were not as dangerous as the Provisional IRA during the Troubles – and tended to form separate groups based on “apparently marginal distinctions” – they could still be dangerous. “In recent months there have been increasing signs of co-ordination and co-operation between the groups,” the MI5 director general told the Worshipful Company of Security Professionals in London on Thursday.
“We have seen an increasing variety of attack techniques used, ranging from shootings to under-car devices to large vehicle bombs. At the same time we have seen improved weapons capability, including the use of Semtex,” he added.
His mention of Semtex, it is understood, refers to the suspected use of small amounts of the explosive in some under-car bomb and other attacks. While the Provisional IRA said it had decommissioned all its arsenals, security sources say some of the dissidents managed to hold back what are believed to be small quantities of Semtex, while also continually trying to smuggle in Semtex and other explosives to Ireland.
Mr Evans said the vast majority of dissident attacks were directed at the PSNI. “While at present the dissidents’ campaign is focused on Northern Ireland,” he added, “we cannot exclude the possibility that they might seek to extend their attacks to Great Britain as violent republican groups have traditionally done,” he warned.
Mr Evans, referring to how, in 2007, MI5 took over lead responsibility for British national security intelligence-gathering in the North from the PSNI, acknowledged security failings in initially assessing the dissident threat.
“Perhaps we were giving insufficient weight to the pattern of history over the last hundred years, which shows that whenever the main body of Irish republicanism has reached a political accommodation and rejoined constitutional politics, a hardliner rejectionist group would fragment off and continue with the so-called armed struggle,” he said.
SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie said it was clear from Mr Evans’s speech that handing over responsibility for intelligence-gathering to MI5 had failed. She said it had “nothing to do with operational effectiveness and everything to do with smoothing Sinn Féin’s path on to the policing board”.
“The dissidents are a threat to Irish democracy and they can only be effectively combated by forces responsible to Irish democracy,” she added. “Primacy in intelligence-gathering must be returned to the PSNI.”
Meanwhile, the policing board has disclosed the overall cost of policing parades and disorder over four days around the Twelfth of July was £2.2 million.