The claim that Ronan Kerr's murder was carried out by the IRA is clearly intended to
inject instability during the election period and to inflame hardline loyalist
feeling.
The Real IRA was led mainly by IRA engineers and quartermasters, 'long rifles' who
urged others to fight from the relative safety of the Republic.
They lacked experienced IRA volunteers who had carried out gun and bomb attacks.
This may now have been supplied.
In a sense the terrorists are only confirming widespread speculation that the
killing has been carried out by a group of former Provos disillusioned with the
peace process. However, their claim that "we are the IRA" feeds into unionist fears
that the Provos' ceasefire was conditional on their objectives being met.
It also fuels speculation that some of the IRA's arsenal of arms and military
explosives was held back from decommissioning by local commanders, who can bring
them into play at any point.
The Massereene attack in which two soldiers were killed using assault rifles is
mentioned, as is the under car booby-trap that injured Peadar Heffron, another PSNI
officer.
These were claimed by known dissident groups, but now the suggestion is that members
of the IRA had been secretly supporting them all along and are still "committed to
working with them".
Nothing could be more calculated to raise suspicion and confusion than such an
assertion. The republican leadership has an opportunity to make a response in their
Easter message this Sunday, but it is a hard claim to refute conclusively. If the
IRA Army Council threatens the new group, as would have been normal in the past,
then that will be taken as direct evidence that the mainstream IRA has not left the
stage.
The likelihood is that this group has bided its time until it was confident that the
IRA would not be in a position to hit back physically as it once would. When the IRA
was active anyone, even a member who used the organisation's name or its weapons
without its permission, faced "execution" under the 'Green Book' code of conduct
which every IRA volunteer signed up to.
Standing down the IRA was always going to open the possibility that some new group,
or a collection of former members, would claim its mantle as their own.
In republican tradition there have been many splits and rebirths. The 1916 Rising
itself was carried out by a breakaway group against the orders of the Irish
Volunteers leadership, and the process has been repeated again and again in
succeeding years.
It is always open to a group of malcontents, keen to frustrate the political
settlement, to declare themselves the true inheritors of the physical force
tradition.
This group is seeking to replace the political way forward supported by the people
of Ireland in the Good Friday Agreement with another generation of violence.
This is time for political leaders of all shades to rally in defence of democracy.
