IRA Dissident Group Falls Apart

Imprisoned leaders of the major Irish Republican Army dissident group, the Real IRA, signaled Saturday night that the terror gang has fallen apart in feuding — four years after it committed the deadliest bombing in Northern Ireland history.

A statement, being published in the Sunday Independent newspaper of Dublin, said the Real IRA was "at an end." The group, founded in 1997 to oppose the IRA cease-fire that year, killed 29 people in a car-bomb attack on the town of Omagh four months after politicians forged Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace pact of 1998.

In their statement the Real IRA commanders said the Aug. 15, 1998 attack on the religiously mixed town "irreparably damaged the Irish republican struggle in the short to medium term and stifled any opposition to the Good Friday Agreement. ... It represented an enormous tactical blunder on our behalf."

Saturday night's statement, which was issued by the splinter group's senior figures in Portlaoise Prison in the Irish midlands, criticized Real IRA members outside the prison for destroying the organization by "fraternizing with criminal elements." That apparently referred to the group's documented involvement in smuggling drugs and cigarettes.

Earlier, the mainstream IRA said it wasn't going to disband in order to revive Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant administration, the key accomplishment of the 1998 pact. It was the IRA's first response to Britain's resumption this week of direct rule in Northern Ireland.

An IRA spokesman said members felt "real anger at the attempt to present the IRA as a threat to the peace process."

"The IRA is not a threat to the process and will not accept the imposition of unrealistic demands," said the spokesman, who would risk arrest if identified by name.

On Thursday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the IRA must demonstrate a permanent commitment to peace. Otherwise, Blair warned, the Ulster Unionist Party could justifiably refuse to resume cooperation in government alongside the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party.

Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, who had been the Protestant chief of the administration, told his party's annual conference Saturday he would not work again with Sinn Fein if it remained "mired in its anti-democratic, conspiratorial and criminal past."

Trimble said the IRA must cease all operations and complete the process, begun in October 2001, of scrapping its hidden stockpiles of weaponry. He said IRA pledges to abstain from violence would not be sufficient.

"We will not be satisfied with some phantom disbandment. The paramilitaries really do have to go away. Their day is over," he said, adding that he also wanted Northern Ireland's myriad outlawed Protestant groups to disappear.

Those groups, although responsible for much more violence in recent months than the IRA, have no government role.

Trimble said he accepted that the IRA's cease-fire and start to disarmament were positive steps, but said there was "overwhelming evidence" that the group was preparing for a potential resumption of hostilities.

Four people, including Sinn Fein's senior legislative aide, are awaiting trial after police raided party activists' homes and offices Oct. 4 and seized more than 1,000 pages of stolen British government documents. Police say the papers contained information about potential IRA targets, including senior British army commanders and prison officers.

Sinn Fein, meanwhile, demanded that Britain immediately restore power to the administration, formed in December 1999 when the Ulster Unionists dropped their demand for the IRA to start disarming first.

Sinn Fein published a detailed plan entitled "Defending the Agreement." It listed a range of Sinn Fein-IRA demands, ranging from accelerated British military cutbacks to an amnesty for IRA suspects on the run from outstanding criminal charges.

"The occupying garrison is intact. A massive military rebuilding program has been completed," the document read, referring to British army forces and installations.

The British army says its forces in Northern Ireland today number about 12,500, a third less than five years ago, while it has dismantled more than 40 bases and watchtowers. Sinn Fein notes that in some places, such as Catholic west Belfast, the army replaced two old bases with a modern single base, amounting to "rationalization rather than demilitarization."