WHEN Irish Republican Army dissidents gunned down their first British security forces in more than a decade, they hoped to provoke a steely security crackdown and tit-for-tat attacks that would drag Belfast back into the bad old days.
But Northern Ireland, for decades trapped in a cycle of grievance and vengeance, seems to have learned from its horror-filled past.
Militants from British Protestant districts who long exacted eye-for-an-eye retaliation against Catholics have held their fire, instead reaching out new hands of friendship to old enemies. Thousands of soldiers have remained confined to their barracks well away from the working-class Irish Catholic districts, where IRA splinter groups are trying to recruit the impressionable, idle young.
“The dissidents’ only real hope is that the British do something stupid, play into their hands with some overreaction,” said Brian Feeney, a Belfast political commentator and Catholic schoolteacher. “It looks as though they (British security authorities) are not going to fall into the trap laid for them.”
“We’re finally seeing that the policy of eye for an eye just leaves everybody blind. The peace process means we’re getting to know people on the other side as flesh-and-blood human beings, not targets,” said Jackie McDonald, senior commander of a working-class Protestant paramilitary group called the Ulster Defense Association that has stuck to a cease-fire. In the past, he said, reprisal would have been automatic.
“Now times have changed and (pro-British) loyalist paramilitaries have matured,” said McDonald, who long directed the killings of Catholics and spent several years in prison for issuing death threats. “They’ll not do what some (Irish) republican with a gun wants them to do.”
When the two main dissident groups struck — the Real IRA killed two soldiers outside an army base Saturday and a Continuity IRA gunman shot a policeman through the back of the head Monday — analysts and politicians appeared evenly divided about what the consequences would be.
The killings highlighted one high-risk consequence of peacemaking. Political efforts to soften Catholic hostility toward Northern Ireland, the predominantly Protestant corner of the island that stayed British when the rest of Ireland won independence in 1921, required security forces to “demilitarize” even though the threat from IRA dissidents continued.
A network of surveillance posts and fortified road checkpoints has been removed from the border, where the dissidents are strongest. The 7,500-member police force increasingly patrols in normal uniforms and cars, not bulletproof vests and armored cars. And the 4,000 remaining troops, who once shadowed police on patrols in Catholic areas, have been restricted to training for missions overseas.
As a result, British forces and police in Northern Ireland are more vulnerable. Dissidents have mounted more than 20 attacks in little more than a year, wounding several police officers in gun, rocket and bomb attacks. The past week’s killings were on targets that simply wouldn’t have existed a few years ago. Constable Stephen Carroll, 48, was shot through the back window of a normal patrol car; a few years ago, he would have arrived into any hard-line Catholic neighborhood in a thick-armored Land Rover with tiny, bulletproof windows.
The soldiers were killed because the prevailing peace convinced troops it was safe to walk outside the walled base, unarmed and without body armor, to retrieve a fast-food order. Two Real IRA gunmen waited for Domino’s Pizza’s to arrive and raked the crowd with 60 bullets; two soldiers died and four other people, including both deliverymen, were badly wounded.
