BELFAST, Northern Ireland, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Northern Ireland security sources have told United Press International they believe the Provisional IRA has been cooperating with the Irish Republic police to crack down on the Real IRA splinter guerrilla group.
The sources said that the Northern Irish police and British security analysts had come to the conclusion that this cooperation had been under way for several months and that it had already prevented the Real IRA from trying to carry out new terrorist attacks to disrupt the peace process in Northern Ireland.
They said that the Provisional IRA was actually assisting the Gardai, or regular police, in the Irish Republic. There was no other explanation for their high success rate against the Real IRA and other militant republican movement dissidents in recent months, the security sources said.
The sources also said Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, was believed to have personally approved the strategy.
The Real IRA will settle for nothing less than the revolutionary dismantling of the establishment in favor of a 32-county socialist republic.
Speaking in Washington Tuesday, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid called the Real IRA the most dangerous threat to peace in Ireland.
Sinn Fein participates in the power-sharing coalition local government that runs Northern Ireland and the party has also launched a well-funded drive to become a significant force in the Dail, the Irish Republic's parliament in Dublin. But any new terrorist attacks by the Real IRA splinter group could disrupt that strategy and discredit Sinn Fein, the security sources said.
There are now almost 60 members of the Real IRA in jail in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, almost all of them captured since 29 people were killed by a Real IRA terror bomb in the Northern Irish town of Omagh in 1998. It was the worst single terrorist death toll in the more than 32 years since the current troubles in Northern Ireland began.
The Irish Republic has very low tolerance levels to political violence, and toward what many there regard as the fascist dimension of republicanism. Sinn Fein has worked tirelessly at constituency level to cast off the stigma and its success in doing so since the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement was signed in the North has been rewarded with dramatically higher levels of public support in the South.
The Irish electorate will decline to appreciate the finer distinctions between republican outfits if bombs start killing people.
In 1998, when Sinn Fein backed the Good Friday Agreement on power sharing in Northern Ireland, many of its diehards opted to defect to rival groups like the Real IRA.
The Irish Republic town of Dundalk, near the border with Northern Ireland, became a regional stronghold for these forces. For that reason President Clinton chose it as the location for an appeal for peace on his last visit to Ireland as president in December 2000.
But it is a measure of how successful Adam's political strategy has been that such defections from the Provisional IRA to the Real IRA have virtually dried up over the last year.
