New IRA ‘Military Grade’ Bomb Ticketed for Northern Ireland Narrowly Misses Royal Visit

The interception of what Irish police are calling an “extremely significant car bomb” at County Monaghan near the border of Northern Ireland puts into sharp relief the threat of violence in that troubled terrain three decades after the signing of the Good Friday agreement. The bomb was discovered on Wednesday, one day before Princess Anne visited Fermanagh, a county of Northern Ireland. It was the Princess Royal’s 65th visit to Northern Ireland and her third this year — she first visited Belfast when she was 10, in 1951. In 1979 a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army killed the princess’s great-uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, aboard his fishing boat at County Sligo, not far from Fermanagh. Police are blaming the New Irish Republican Army for the device, which contained “military grade explosives,” a power unit, and a detonator. It is not immediately known if the princess was a target. The New IRA, a successor to the republican Provisional IRA that fought British and unionist paramilitary groups across decades of violence at Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles,” aims to overthrow British rule in Northern Ireland.The bomb was detected in an intelligence operation by An Garda Síochána, or the Irish police, at Carrickmacross, about 65 miles from Belfast, the seat of British rule at Northern Ireland — and 90 miles from Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland. During the Troubles the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland was the site of frequent smuggling of weapons. Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly declares that “we certainly know that there are a small minority of dissident republicans who did not agree with the Good Friday Agreement, they did not put weapons and explosives out of use, they didn’t, you know, go through with the proper process in relation to decommissioning.” The IRA formally ended its armed campaign in 2005, but splinter groups like the New IRA refuse to lay down their arms. In 2019 a journalist, Lyra McKee, was slain while reporting on rioting at Londonderry. Earlier this month three men were acquitted of involvement in the killing. The gunman has never been found. The New IRA claims the shooting was accidental because the intended target was the British police. Garda have arrested two suspects in connection to the bomb plot. The car was driven by Isobella Perrie Sullivan, a 25 year old law student who has been charged with possession of explosives. Her lawyers insist that she was unaware that she was ferrying a bomb. Also arrested was a museum worker, Simon O’Donovan, 44, who lives at Dublin and is alleged to be linked to that city’s branch of the New IRA. Ms. Perrie Sullivan’s youth and red hair are reminiscent of a revolutionary bomber from the Troubles, Dolours Price. During Ms. Perrie Sullivan’s court appearance this week her lawyer disclosed that she had spent time in Saoradh, a far left political party founded in 2016 — a century after the Easter Rising — whose name means “liberation” in Gaeilge. The party’s initial press release declared its “commitment to the unfinished revolution, the liberation of Ireland and the social emancipation of the Irish People.” The Irish Politics Newsletter reports that Ms. Perrie Sullivan also went by the name Markievicz Ní Shúileabhán. That appears to be an homage to an Irish revolutionary nationalist of an early era, Constance Georgine Markievicz. She abandoned her roots in the Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning elite to campaign for Irish independence. Markievicz was the first woman elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Isobella Perrie Sullivan, a lawyer charged with ferrying a bomb toward the border with Northern Ireland. Via Irish Politics NewsletterThe poet William Butler Yeats wrote a poem about Markievicz and her sister, collected in “The Winding Stair and Other Poems,” where he described them as “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / beautiful, one a gazelle.” The gazelle was Markievicz’s sister, Eva Gore-Booth. The poet laments that “The innocent and the beautiful / have no enemy but time.” The “Winding Stair” is a reference to Yeats’s Norman castle, Thoor Ballylee. The leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Northern Irish faction loyal to London, declared that the “discovery of a viable Semtex bomb should have reminded everyone that dissident republican terrorism remains a lethal threat.” Semtex is a brand of plastic explosive first engineered in Czechoslovakia in 1958. In the 1980s the material was sent to the IRA from the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.The Troubles scarred Northern Ireland for some three decades as republican forces, largely Catholic, battled unionists, mostly Protestant. The violence claimed some 3,500 lives of whom around half were civilians and a third were British forces. The grinding asymmetric urban warfare was a legacy of Ireland’s war of independence, which in 1923 resulted in the 24 counties of the Republic of Ireland and six counties that remained under British rule.While the Good Friday Agreement brought peace, it hardly settled the question of Northern Ireland. The accord acknowledges the yearning for unification in some quarters, and provides for a referendum on that head if the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland believes a majority of voters in Northern Ireland would support it. A simple majority vote of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland would bring all 32 counties together.The wounds of the Troubles, though, have never quite healed. Earlier this year the Sinn Féin politician Gerry Adams was put on trial at London in civil litigation brought by three victims of IRA bombings at London and Manchester in 1973 and 1996. Mr. Adams has always denied membership in the IRA, though he is widely accused of having been a mastermind of the terror. The case was dropped, though, with no admission from Mr. Adamas.The Londonderry-born poet Seamus Heaney — like Yeats, a winner of the Nobel Prize — described the Northern Ireland of the Troubles as a “land of password, handgrip, wink and nod/ Of open minds as open as a trap/Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks/ Where half of us, as in a wooden horse/Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks/ Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.” He counseled “whatever you say, you say nothing.”

New IRA ‘Military Grade’ Bomb Ticketed for Northern Ireland Narrowly Misses Royal Visit

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