Analysis: Terror revisits Northern Ireland

BERLIN, March 10 (UPI) -- The shooting deaths of a police officer and two soldiers in just 48 hours have stirred up worries that sectarian violence could return to Northern Ireland.

On Monday night, police officer Stephen Carroll, 48, was shot dead southwest of Belfast in an area with a strong nationalist republican backing, when he and his colleague responded to an emergency call.

The killing came just two days after soldiers Mark Quinsey, 23, and Patrick Azimkar, 21, were shot dead when they picked up pizza from two delivery men at the gates of a Massereene Barracks in the town of Antrim. Two other soldiers and the two deliverymen were seriously wounded.

A dissident republican group, the Real IRA, claimed responsibility for the attack on the soldiers; another group, the Continuity IRA, claimed the killing of the policeman, who was shot in the head while waiting in his car in the town of Craigavon in County Armagh.

The three killings have brought back memories of the violence that dominated Northern Ireland for decades until a peace deal was reached in 2005.

The mood in Northern Ireland on Tuesday was one of "shock, terror and outrage," Richard Wilford, a politics professor at Queen's University Belfast and a leading expert on the peace process in Northern Ireland, told United Press International in a telephone interview.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, eager to diffuse tensions, said the killings would not damage the peace process.

"The people of Northern Ireland and the political parties of Northern Ireland stand behind the political process, want to see it work and to be effective," Brown told reporters. He vowed that the attackers would be "hunted down and brought to justice as quickly as possible."

Even leaders of Sinn Fein, the predominantly Catholic party associated with the Irish Republic Army, denounced the killings.

"These people are traitors to the island of Ireland," Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness, also Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, told reporters. "They don't deserve the support of anyone."

Some are concerned that the peace process and the power-sharing government between Catholics and Protestants will be undermined if Britain brings back troops to Northern Ireland to contain resurgent violence.

While such a move isn't being considered at the moment, no one knows what could happen if violence continues unabated. "I don't think these two attacks we just witnessed will be the last," Wilford warned.

There have been a series of attacks by the Real IRA over the past 18 months, in which five police officers were injured (one was shot in the chest while dropping off his daughter at school). The most recent attacks, however, have a new quality.

They already prompted McGuinness and Peter Robinson, a Protestant leader and Northern Ireland's first minister, to cancel their joint visit to the United States, where they had planned to meet President Barack Obama.

Local officials in Northern Ireland are about to take over the sectors of policing and criminal justice from the British government, a development that displeases the republican dissidents, Wilford said.

"From their perspective, it's better to have policing and criminal justice in the hands of the British government, because it can be seen as striking at the British state in attacking soldiers and police officers," he told UPI.

There is some indication that the Real IRA, a dissident group founded in 1997, and the smaller Continuity IRA, founded in 1994, share "personnel, intelligence and information between them," Wilford said.

While their attacks have become more sinister, the groups' means are limited.

Based on a cellular structure, both groups are poorly resourced, lightly armed and small in numbers -- the Real IRA has some 100 active members, the Continuity IRA even fewer, Wilford said.

"That's why they can't bring Northern Ireland to a complete standstill," he added.

There is, however, the risk of retaliatory attacks from Protestant paramilitaries, which could plunge Northern Ireland into sectarian violence once again.

Major Protestant leaders have urged their followers not to strike back, but Wilford said the loyalist paramilitaries are somewhat hard to control.

"They don't have that kind of unified central command and control structure the Provisional IRA enjoyed," he told UPI. "So there is always some risk that some lunatic from the loyalist camp might decide to do something stupid."