The Real IRA

I spent yesterday, today, and most of the weekend in bed or in an armchair reading. Today I recalled something I heard on the radio while driving last week that I meant to put on the blog.

There have been quite a few ugly execution-style murders in Dublin in recent years related to two families that each have international business interests. Of the illegal substance kind. There’s a grudge match between them and they have pulled off some very bold daylight attacks. In one, they got the wrong guy, shooting him dead in front of his wife and three children while on holiday in Spain. He was Irish, but his crime was talking to the intended target while waiting for their kids to get ice cream, or something equally innocent.

The murder last week was a bit more complicated. Prior to the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, the IRA laid down arms and took up politics, seeking to achieve Irish unity using ballots rather than bullets. The Agreement enshrined minority representation, giving us the strange spectre of a partnership government between the Democratic Unionist Party (which will fight to its last breath to remain loyal to the British crown) and Sinn Fein, which (peacefully) fights for Irish unification. When the agreement was signed, Catholics and Protestants each were represented by more moderate parties but, as in the U.S., politicians excel at pandering to and enlarging the extremes, giving us barbell politics.

But I digress. The Real IRA is a splinter group that continues to violently oppose Ireland’s partition. They occasionally blow up a van or shoot rocket propelled grenades at police vehicles. They seem more of a marginal nuisance than the menace of their predecessor (although they will go down in infamy for the Omagh bombing of 1998, which accelerated the peace process). In the Republic, the Real IRA is meant to provide financial and logistical support to efforts in the north to harass the police and British army. However, some members of the Real IRA have decided their Real purpose should be to execute Dublin drug dealers. Other members thought extorting money from drug dealers and business owners would be good business. Each of these lines of work generated enemies among businessmen selling drugs, fish and chips, and a variety of other things. It also really pissed off the Real IRA in the north, who felt the boy-os in the Republic had lost the plot. I think the most recent murder was of a Real IRA member in the south who had been extorting drug money and I think the hit was done by the Real IRA in the north, who are, you know, protecting the brand.

But it’s hard to say. Whenever I hear these news reports, it seems more like a radio drama than the real world.
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