A LOCAL Derry branch of the Ulster Bank and a small hotel/restaurant, Da Vinci’s, were the latest on Monday night to be targeted by republican “dissident”car bombers. And, of course, the frightened residents of a quiet, largely Catholic middle-class estate and of a nursing home, evacuated in the middle of the night. A few years ago their neighbour was a huge British army base – what republicans used to call a “legitimate target” – but now long gone, courtesy of the peace process so despised by the dissidents as having achieved nothing.
These were the softest and easiest of soft targets. They are of no possible strategic or military significance in any warped logic. Except in that they represent normality and normality itself is the enemy. A normality that would later this week have allowed the Northern Ireland Policing Board to meet community representatives at the Da Vinci to discuss the policing of domestic abuse in the area. A welcome normality that permitted the North’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin to address the Tory Party conference in Birmingham yesterday.
Once again, however, the Real IRA, which has claimed responsibility for the attack – and other dissidents – have demonstrated that they are a real threat. Although numerically still small, they have a developing capacity for deadly military force.
Two months ago an even smaller group exploded a 200lb car bomb outside a police station half a mile away in the city’s Strand Road. That attack followed the murder by dissidents of three security force members last year, some dozens of other attacks this year, and their involvement in rioting in Belfast early in the summer. And the Real IRA recently publicly threatened to target banks and financial institutions in the City of London, accusing them of “financing Britain’s colonial and capitalist system”.
On Monday police chiefs at a cross-Border conference on organised crime in Belfast expressed concern at the growing range of bomb-making techniques exhibited by dissident groups and their increasing co-operation. Eleven days ago the British security services raised the threat level of a dissident attack in the wider UK from moderate to substantial, a worrying assessment that has been echoed by Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy. But there have been some successes in thwarting dissidents and North-South security co-operation, both at police and political levels, is reportedly as close as it has ever been. The commissioner points to arrests this year of more than 50 people in the Republic, with 22 before the courts on dissident charges.
Such unrepresentative groups will not thrive in the long run but it is likely they can survive on the fringes of a society in which sectarian tensions and economic and social marginalisation continue to act as recruiting sergeants for extremism. Which is why, as massive British government cutbacks come down the tracks, Mr McGuinness’s special pleading for the North, in which he explicitly links peace process commitments to continued spending, is a case that must be heard.