Real IRA: Northern Ireland's deadly dissenters
Robert Barr, AP, 9 Mar 2009
The Real IRA, which claimed responsibility for killing two British soldiers over the weekend, has caused more havoc than any other Irish Republican Army splinter group since most IRA members embraced a peace process in Northern Ireland.
The Real IRA pursues a dream, abandoned by the mainstream of the IRA, of forcing Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into the Republic of Ireland.
It committed Northern Ireland's deadliest terrorist act, the Aug. 15, 1998 car bombing in Omagh that killed 29 people and wounded more than 300. However, it has shown nothing approaching the IRA's ability to mount attacks from 1970 to 1997, when it killed nearly 1,800 people in both Northern Ireland and Britain.
The dissidents are few in number, according to Paul Bew, professor of Irish politics at Queen's University in Belfast.
"Their potential influence lies in their ability to capsize the arrangements that have been reached between larger groups," Bew said in a commentary published Monday in The Times newspaper in London.
The group's reputed founder, Michael McKevitt, is in jail, the first man ever convicted in Ireland on a charge of directing terrorism.
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