The United States today doubled its estimate for the strength of Real IRA group, which carried out the Omagh bombing.
The State Department said in its Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2000 that the Real IRA had increased its membership from 70 according to its 1999 estimate, to between 150 and 200 people.
The group is mainly made up of former members of the mainstream IRA.
The annual report left the mainstream IRA entry largely unchanged, putting its membership at several hundred despite defections.
It said both groups were suspected of receiving funds from US-based sympathizers.
Neither group has been put on a separate, longer list of designated foreign terrorist organizations that would make funding by US citizens illegal and mean that their representatives could be denied US visas.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is soon expected to announce a response to a British-Irish request to designate the Real IRA in a bid to starve it of funding.
Another Northern Irish group listed in the report was the Continuity IRA, another splinter group formed in 1994.
On the loyalist side, groups listed were the Loyalist Volunteer Force, Orange Volunteers with an estimated 20 hard-core members and Red Hand Defenders at a similar size.
The report put the number of LVF members at about 150, compared to an estimate last year, based on British press reports, of about 250 people.
The LVF has no foreign support and has exploded smaller bombs using commercial explosives.