THE POLICE Service of Northern Ireland and MI5 have struggled to cope with the challenge posed by dissident Republican groups, such as the Real IRA, because of the loss of the RUC’s special branch, a report yesterday claimed.
“Senior officers have admitted the existence of a skills gap,” according to Dr Martyn Frampton, author of the report for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence.
The centre, which seeks to counter the growth of radicalisation and political violence, is a collaboration between King’s College London, the University of Pennsylvania, Israel’s Interdisciplinary Centre and the Jordanian Regional Centre for Conflict.
PSNI community policing “has been seriously weakened by dissident violence”, said the report, which mentions “no-go” areas, including one case in Derry in June when police refused to respond to a call from a terrified couple threatened in their home by armed men.
Saying that there had been “security consequences” because of the retirement of RUC officers, Prof Frampton said the change in police culture was judged to have brought a loss of counter-terrorist “corporate memory”.
“The dissidents are not on a learning curve as the Provos were in their early years. These people have the accumulated knowledge of decades of terrorism – they know how to grind explosives, make a TPU [timer], lay a command wire, do a doorstep shooting and escape, forensic clean-up, etc.
“They are already years ahead of their predecessors at this stage in their existence, and they are increasingly likely to become much more effective in the apparent absence of the necessary apparatus and infrastructures to suppress and thwart their activities,” he warned.
Because of the wind-down of the IRA, “whatever their affiliation, dissidents of one hue or another appear to enjoy increasing control in republican areas across Northern Ireland: south Fermanagh, Derry city (Bogside and Creggan), south Derry, north Armagh (Lurgan-Craigavon), east Tyrone, south Armagh and Belfast (north and west)”, he said.
MI5 now had the lead on NI counter-intelligence, but, Prof Frampton said, it was heavily reliant on “on the ground” police units and their capacity to feed intelligence material to it.
“Yet these are the same police units that were downsized and to some extent deskilled over the last decade. In the view of those centrally involved in the former system, an intelligence hub is only as good as the information it can gather . . . for this, MI5 relies on others . . . it is not in the field in the way that special branch was.
“The reality is that we now have a divided system – between the PSNI and MI5 – where once you had a unified set-up under the control, however imperfect, of RUC special branch. It remains to be seen how the new MI5-led system will perform,” he said, adding that MI5 has been “slow to recognise the scale of the challenge it faces”.
