BELFAST, (Reuters) – When IRA-linked gunmen turned their fire on one other this summer they triggered a political crisis in Northern Ireland’s fragile government of pro-British unionists and republicans working for a united Ireland.
They also revealed an uncomfortable truth: 17 years after a U.S.-brokered truce to end three decades of sectarian violence, the province remains riven with old enmities.
The immediate cause of this particular crisis was the murder of a former Irish Republican Army member, Kevin McGuigan, outside his Belfast home last month. Police say the killing was revenge for the murder of another former IRA member, Jock Davison, in May over a feud that went back decades.
Police said the murders were evidence that the IRA, that fought for independence from Britain and was supposedly disarmed under the terms of the 1998 ‘Good Friday’ peace agreement, continues to operate in the criminal underworld.
Nor does it operate alone, security sources, police and politicians said. Some members of the armed groups on both sides of the conflict are thriving, their focus now on racketeering.
The new generation of armed groups may be much smaller and less sophisticated than the military-style structures that were involved in the deaths of 3,600 people during the so-called Troubles, these sources said, but they continue to exacerbate the religious tensions while profiting from crime.
Veterans of Northern Ireland’s war warn that if the politicians fail to get a grip of the situation, the segregation along sectarian lines that still exists in many parts of the province can only get worse, exploited by these groups.
One of those briefly arrested in relation to the McGuigan killing was Bobby Storey, a senior member of the Sinn Fein party that was once the political arm of the IRA. Storey, who was released without charge, said there was no basis for his arrest and those behind the murder were enemies of Sinn Fein’s embrace of peace. The police declined further comment.
Sinn Fein, part of Northern Ireland’s power sharing government, says the IRA has “left the stage”. The police’s assertion that the IRA still exists, however, drove the pro-British Unionists to withdraw most of its ministers from government, bringing it to the brink of collapse.
The unionists say paramilitary activity must be tackled if Northern Ireland is to move forward.
“To have stability in the future we need to deal with that cancer at the heart of government now,” said acting First Minister Arlene Foster, a Unionist who survived a bomb attack on a school bus at the age of 17.
While life has changed for many in bustling central Belfast, parts of Northern Ireland remain divided.
The divide is felt strongest in the working class areas of Belfast where there is little integration and little obvious economic benefit from the peace.
“I have no friends on the other side of the community and I believe I never will,” said Jake, a 57-year-old community worker who stood smoking on the Protestant Shankill Road underneath British flags fluttering from every building and lamp post.
While a multi-million pound make-over draws tourists to the capital Belfast, to the docks where the Titanic was built and to the area’s rolling green hills, the sprawling low-rise Belfast estates still carry the scars of the conflict.
To be sure, the end of what amounted to a war is enormous progress. Cross-community initiatives have taken off. There is a level of integration that would have been unthinkable in the past.
As a result, Peter Shirlow, director of Irish studies at the University of Liverpool, said Northern Ireland was now a very different place to the one that gave rise to sectarian violence in the late 1960s.
