Northern Ireland Is Shocked by Spate of Violence
Officer Killed Days After Soldiers Died

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 11, 2009

CRAIGAVON, Northern Ireland, March 10 -- Matt Thompson was watching television Monday evening when he heard a sound he had never wanted to hear again: two loud gunshots.

Just outside his modest stucco house southwest of Belfast, a 48-year-old policeman had been shot dead, apparently by radical forces opposed to Britain's continued rule of the province.

"This is appalling. I've carried the coffins. I've been at the funerals," said Thompson, 56. "I've seen my daughter go through this. I don't want my granddaughter to have to. We can't go back to that."

The killing of officer Stephen Paul Carroll, two days after the slayings of two British soldiers at an army base north of Belfast, has shocked a province that thought its three decades of armed conflict, known as the Troubles, were finally over.

Dissident paramilitary groups said they carried out the killings: The Real IRA said it killed the soldiers, and the more obscure Continuity IRA asserted responsibility for the police killing. Both groups oppose British rule of the province and want it to be reunited with Ireland.

The Irish Republican Army, which led the popular uprising during the Troubles, agreed to the landmark Good Friday peace accords in 1998 and decommissioned its weapons in 2005. The IRA agreed to pursue its cause through politics, but the marginal splinter groups continue to conduct sporadic violent attacks.

Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, is a partner in a new power-sharing government with the province's majority Protestants.

On Tuesday, Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein leader who is the provincial government's deputy leader, called the killers "traitors to the island of Ireland."

"They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island," he said.

"This is a battle of wills between the political class and the evil gunmen -- the political class will win," said the co-leader of the power-sharing government, Peter Robinson, head of the Democratic Unionist Party, the largest Protestant party.

Robinson and McGuinness postponed a joint trip to the United States for St. Patrick's Day because of the shootings.

Police said Tuesday that they had arrested two men, ages 17 and 37, and were questioning them about the police killing.

Hugh Orde, the province's top police officer, said the actions of "criminal psychopaths" would not mean a return of British army patrols to the streets of Northern Ireland.

It has been more than a decade since a soldier or police officer has been killed here. But many said they feared that loyalist paramilitary groups -- largely Protestant gangs formed to counter the IRA -- could be provoked and could commit reprisal attacks.

Craigavon is a collection of large housing developments set around numerous traffic circles, stretching several miles between the towns of Portadown and Lurgan.

Many people moved to the area's tracts of stucco, two-story houses during the 1960s and 1970s from Belfast, as the sectarian violence there increased. In the predominantly Catholic Lismore Manor estate where the shooting occurred, row after row of pale-yellow houses are set amid broad and otherwise empty fields.

"If it starts again, we will move. I will leave," said Sioban Houston, 39, whose family moved to Craigavon in 1969, when she was an infant. "We thought this was all over. It's a disgrace. I felt sick this morning when I heard the news."

Houston said that many houses in Craigavon had been renovated in recent years but that the work largely stopped last year as the global financial crisis hit. She and others worried that renewed violence would harm investment in the area.

Historian Tim Pat Coogan, who has written a history of the IRA, said it is unclear whether Continuity IRA and Real IRA are cooperating or competing with each other. But he said that with these attacks, both splinter groups aim to weaken Sinn Fein's leadership.

"They are trying to make trouble for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. They think they were sellouts" for dropping the fight to force Britain out of Northern Ireland, Coogan said in a telephone interview from Dublin.

Although these splinter groups have few members, he said, it does not take much to do damage "if you have an isolated farmhouse at the end of the lane and you get some guns."

"It has been known for some time that they were gaining strength," he said about the dissidents, noting that Orde had called for special intelligence reconnaissance teams to return to Northern Ireland and that there had been a surge in attempts against the police.

A spokesman for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the province's force, said there had been four direct attacks on police officers in the past 16 months.

Clive McFarland, a Democratic Unionist Party member from Omagh, said numerous attempts to target police with shootings or booby-trap explosions in the past 18 months could have killed up to 40 people had they been successful.

McFarland said "terrorist groups" are recruiting people born after the height of the Troubles.

"What parents and grandparents need to do now is make sure young people are not drawn in by these people," said Craigavon Mayor Sydney Anderson.

At Kate's Place, a coffee shop near Craigavon's school and Catholic church, Geraldine McConville, 42, said her 16-year-old daughter drove past the shooting site about 10 minutes before Carroll was killed on her way home from studying with a friend.

"I do power-walking in the evenings, and I never thought somebody was going to stop and shoot me," McConville said, adding that the last big attack in Craigavon was a bombing 16 years ago.

She said several of her regular customers were discussing moving away from Northern Ireland, and others were talking about holding a prayer session at the church.

"Everybody's going to be walking on tenterhooks for a while," she said.

Thompson, who heard the shots Monday night, said that in years past, injustice against Catholics made the IRA's cause appealing to many. But now, he said, with Catholics co-governing the province, that justification is gone and even those who want a united Ireland favor politics over violence.

"A lot of people have worked hard to improve things here," he said. "I'd just like these people to tell me what future they see."

As Thompson spoke in the front seat of a car, his 6-year-old granddaughter tried to get his attention from the back seat.

"Someone shot a policeman dead," she said. "Why did they do that?"

"What do I tell her?" he said.

Correspondent Mary Jordan and special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.