The ambush of a senior Northern Ireland police officer on Wednesday night was almost certainly the work of a tiny group of so-called republican dissidents who have long tried – and consistently failed – to escalate a violent campaign.
The New IRA has launched sporadic attacks on security forces over the past decade to show that there is still a flickering flame in the tradition of physical-force republicanism.
It is not about Brexit, the Northern Ireland protocol or the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. It is not about sparking a Troubles 2.0. It is about showing they exist.
While Northern Ireland transitions to a post-conflict normality – notwithstanding Stormont’s political dysfunction – the New IRA and other dissident groups lurk in the shadows, looking for opportunities to unsettle the security services and the rest of society.
A hoax warning here, an improvised device there, a shooting. Mostly the attempts fail. The groups’ numbers are small, their terrorist skillset meagre, and they have been infiltrated by intelligence services.
Yet every so often they manage to maim and kill. By such a yardstick, if carried out by the New IRA, Wednesday’s attack was a rare success. Two masked men shot and critically injured a detective chief inspector, John Caldwell. The 48-year-old father was off duty and putting footballs into the boot of his car at a sports complex in Omagh, County Tyrone. He was with his son and other children he had been coaching.
While people and political leaders across the UK and Ireland expressed horror, those responsible will have celebrated. Caldwell was a senior, high-profile officer. The attack made headlines and chilled the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Three men were arrested on Thursday but that is no guarantee they will be charged, let alone tried and convicted. If this was the work of the New IRA, their only regret will be not killing Caldwell outright.
The New IRA emerged in 2012 via a merger of several groups opposed to the peace process, including the Real IRA. Police believe it has several hundred active supporters, a mix of former Provisional IRA members and new, young recruits, including some born after the 1998 Good Friday agreement.
In their worldview, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness sold out by abandoning the armed struggle. There is, after all, no united Ireland. Those who keep fighting for it are the true republicans. That they are politically isolated and publicly reviled reinforces the self-mythology.
A timeline of New IRA attacks shows a concentration in and around Derry, plus a combination of ineptitude, dogged persistence and ability to change tactics.
In January 2019, a van bomb exploded at a courthouse in Derry moments after police had evacuated the area. Three months later a New IRA gunman killed the journalist Lyra McKee – she had been standing beside a police Land Rover - during a riot in Derry’s Creggan area. In June 2019, it claimed responsibility for placing a device under a police officer’s car at a golf club.
In April 2021, a bomb with flammable liquid was left close to a police officer’s car in Dungiven. A year later, youths attacked police with petrol bombs during an Easter parade linked to dissidents. In November, a delivery driver in Derry was hijacked and ordered to drive to a police station. Later that month a New IRA improvised device damaged a police patrol car in Strabane. The two officers inside were not hurt.
The market town of Omagh was the scene of the worst attack of the Troubles – a Real IRA car bomb that killed 29 in 1998. Some thought the scale of public revulsion would chasten dissidents into abandoning violence. They didn’t.
