Who will fill IRA vacuum?
By Barry O’Kelly
31 July 2005
“They have already gone away, you know,” an IRA veteran said sourly last week, ahead of the formal declaration instructing all volunteers to hand up their arms.
The man’s ironic twist on the famous remark by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams some years ago - “they haven’t gone away, you know’‘ - reflects the unease felt by some republicans about the behind-the-scenes moves leading up to last week’s historic announcement that the IRA was to end its armed campaign and dump its weaponry.
The IRA’s estimated 600 volunteers, minus a handful of exceptions, are expected to abide by last Thursday’s instruction, an extraordinary achievement, owing as much to clever internal manoeuvring as it does to the persuasive powers of Adams and the electoral gains of Sinn Féin.
The manoeuvres have been slow, almost imperceptible at times. But the IRA which declared an end to armed struggle was a very different organisation to the one which last called a ceasefire nine years ago.
The membership, as of 4pm last Thursday, included at least 100 people recruited after the 1997 ceasefire. Their sole purpose, claim those marginalised in the process, was to shore up support for Adams’s political project.
In Dublin, for instance, between 12 and 15 new volunteers were recruited last year alone, informed republican sources told The Sunday Business Post. One of the leading figures in the movement in the city was a man who never saw active service, the sources said. New recruits were also taken on in Louth, South Armagh and Belfast, while those perceived to be unsupportive were effectively sidelined.
At a senior level, commanders in the key republican areas of South Armagh, Tyrone and Belfast were brought on to dominate the Army Council which now has a distinctly northern bias, thereby ensuring greater discipline over the militant brigades. Tellingly, South Armagh recently had two representatives on the seven-member council, one of whom is a man nicknamed The Surgeon. This newspaper understands that this veteran battalion commander, who is thought to be responsible for the deaths of 70 people, is believed to have grown tired of the project and stood down from the council. However, the move did not prompt any local volunteers to leave. The mood in the republican heartland was one of sombre resignation following the announcement last week. Only key local commanders had been briefed in advance, but there was no talk of dissent or defections to dissident groups.
One source likened the advance briefings to the Adams axis making an address to a mirror: the key figures being consulted were already on-message, having been appointed in the first place by those briefing them.
“I don’t have a problem with this,” the source said. “Good luck to them. You’re never going to get everybody to agree.” Those not in agreement, he added, now hold little influence in the republican movement. Or so it seems. Gardai believe this is the great imponderable hanging over last week’s statement. The best barometer of republican thinking on such events, an army convention attended by hundreds of volunteers, did not take place ahead of the announcement - it was not required after a change in IRA rules in 1997.
“There was obviously a reason why they didn’t hold a convention.
“So who knows how many hardliners are going to move over to the dissidents? There is no intelligence to show this is going to happen, but we simply don’t know,” a Special Branch detective said.
The Special Branch recently launched a review of its personnel resources, in anticipation of the statement winding down the IRA.
About 300 officers are believed to be engaged in monitoring republicans. This figure will remain unchanged in the short term. “We will still be monitoring the same people as before to make sure they are playing ball,” a detective said.
“There is also a worry that they could join the dissidents. But the primary focus now will be on monitoring the dissidents themselves.”
While the IRA has not actually gone away, the now inactive group is headed by an army council whose raison d’etre is to ensure it remains that way. For the first time in its recent history, the controlling body is now comprised entirely of people from the North.
This is no coincidence, according to republican sources. The most committed and experienced IRA members are in the Northern brigades. And the presence of four men from Belfast, two from Tyrone and one from South Armagh will obviously enhance the likelihood of keeping local units in check.
It is believed that a core unit is being retained to protect the IRA leadership itself from assassination and to ensure internal security.
How this will function in practice is unclear. The dissident Real IRA and Continuity IRA are expected to seek to capitalise on the demise of the Provisionals. The Real IRA (RIRA), the bigger of the two, has about 150 members in Limerick, Dublin, Dundalk, Derry and Belfast. Detectives said this weekend that RIRA has been actively recruiting in recent months, particularly in Dublin where it has one technical expert, a mature college student.
The group is also believed to have one or possibly two members in the Irish army, the sources said.
However, the organisation is riven by informants and tainted by its wholesale involvement in crime.
Meanwhile, detectives are sceptical of their own chances of unravelling the Byzantine business affairs of the Provisionals, in spite of the expressed determination to do so by the Minister for Justice Michael McDowell. IRA sources are similarly sceptical. The huge finance department once raised millions of euro every year from cigarette and oil smuggling, cafes, bars, taxi firms, building companies, property deals, nightclubs and the occasional bank robbery.
However, these interests have been cut adrift by the republican movement over the past year, according to sources. Many of the people running the businesses simply received start-up loans at low interest. “They are on their own now, the movement no longer has an interest in them,” a source said.
This generous policy is not without its benefits: anyone who now stands to gain would be loathe to oppose the Adams strategy. The financial rewards from the Northern Bank heist are likely to achieve a similar shift in thinking, if it is required of those who took part.
Again, gardai are unlikely to successfully prosecute any member of the 40-plusteamwho carried out the record €37.8 million heist last December. The Sunday Business Post understands that detectives will be relying on corroborative evidence to make a link between the €3 million seized in Cork and the bank robbery in Belfast.
“It is beyond doubt that this is the money from the robbery, and we’re confident a case will be made on the basis of all evidence gathered to date,” a source said.
However, the source conceded that it would be extremely difficult to identify to the satisfaction of an Irish court that any of the one million seized notes were stolen, solely on the basis of bank records or forensic evidence taken from pre-robbery users of the notes.
The source revealed that files on ten people, all of them from Munster, will be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions arising from the wide-ranging probe. Gardai will be recommending that these people be charged with money-laundering offences. Most of these people are not thought to be IRA members.
While the Provisionals have tidied up their financial affairs, restructured their command structures and marginalised the mavericks, it has left behind a small, deeply apprehensive group of activists, who administered justice as they were instructed to do against drug dealers and joyriders in working class estates.
“It is no longer our role to go after them [criminals]. But there’s also no protection either,” said one source. “All of that is finished.
“Who knows what’s going to happen? And who is going to fill the vacuum?”
