IrelandQuestions raised about Provisional IRA’s possible return to its violent ways
It has been assumed that Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) has “gone away,” in the words of Sinn Féin’s leader Gerry Adams. In the wake of the 13 August killing in Belfast of a former IRA operative, police north of south of the border have launched an investigation into whether PIRA is still engaged in violence. Separately, a former member of PIRA, who is now a historian working in theBoston College Belfast Project, has charged that hackers affiliated with Sinn Féin have hacked his and his wife’s communication and leaked some of it to the press. U.S. courts allowed the Northern Ireland police access to portions of the archive, leading to arrests of several prominent Belfast Republicans.
Kevin McGuigan, a former IRA assassin, was killed in the Catholic Short Strand district of east Belfast on 13 August. After the killing, Ireland’s justice minister, Frances Fitzgerald, has ordered the head of the Garda Siochána, the Irish Republic’s police force, to find out more about the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and its activities.
The investigation by Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) found that some PIRA members were involved in the vendetta killing of McGuigan. In all, eleven people have been arrested in relation to the killing.
Sinn Féin has insisted it had nothing to do with PIRA or the killing, and claimed that Sinn Féin’s opponents on both sides of the border were using McGuigan’s killing t score political points ahead of the elections scheduled for next year.
In the wake of the investigation, Fitzgerald told the Guardian: “Recent developments are of considerable concern but what we need to do now is establish all the current facts and that is what is happening in the rigorous investigation being carried out by the PSNI.
“I have asked the Garda commissioner to liaise closely with the PSNI and carry out a fresh assessment of the status of PIRA in the light of any new evidence emerging during the PSNI investigation into the death of Mr McGuigan.”
Fitzgerald is a member ofFine Gael, the dominant coalition party in Dublin, and she believes that PIRA was still more engaged in political rather than military activities. She added, however: “To simply say PIRA continues to exist as if nothing has changed would be quite wrong.”
The leader of the Irish Labor party, Joan Burton, was skeptical about claims by Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams that the PIRA had “gone away.”
“When people leave the stage, that leaves the question where do they go? Are they at the side of the stage or at the back of the stage?” Burton told the Guardian.
The investigation into the killing of McGuigan took place against the backdrop of another investigation – into the hacking of communications by former PIRA member Anthony McIntyre, who is now a researcher of the historyof the IRA, and his wife, , Carrie Twomey.
Senior Sinn Féin figures in Belfast harshly criticized McIntyre for his research activities in the Boston College Belfast Project. The Project’s archive contains unvarnished information provided by IRA and loyalist veterans about their activities – including torture and killings — during the Troubles. U.S. courts allowed the PSNI access to some of the information in the archive, which led to the arrests of several prominent Belfast republicans.
McIntyre and Twomey allege that their calls and e-mails to American diplomatic staff in Dublin were intercepted by a “non-state organization” – that is, the hackers were working on behalf of Sinn Féin — and that some of the illegally intercepted material was leaked to the press.
Ed Moloney, the director of the Belfast Project, has written to the Garda commissioner Nóírin O’Sullivan to urge a thorough investigation of McIntyre’s and Twomey’s allegations. “I need hardly point out that if this allegation is shown to have substance it is a very serious matter which amounts to a direct challenge to the authority of the state and its security arms.”
