Real IRA targets Catholic police

In the ten years since the Good Friday agreement brokered by Tony Blair kick-started the peace process, Northern Ireland has made impressive progress towards a deal acceptable on both sides of what was once a bitter sectarian divide.

With the major political parties onside, and the Provisional IRA and the main Protestant paramilitary groups abandoning violence, there was an almost tangible sense of optimism among the many friends whom I made as a journalist covering the worst of 'the Troubles'. But now concern is growing about the threat posed by armed Republican factions who remain bitterly opposed to the power-sharing arrangements that underpin the entire peace agreement

Although a report to be published today says that the IRA's Army Council - which has never been dissolved - poses no threat, a senior security official has told The First Post

that "dissident" Republican groups are deliberately targeting Catholic members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in a bid to deter potential recruits from the Nationalist community. The seven attacks that have taken place so far include one that saw a Catholic officer shot and wounded: another was shot at outside a police station and a number of serving officers have had to move home after they and their families came under surveillance by known extremist elements.

The most recent attack on police occurred last week when a masked sniper fired five shots at officers responding to telephoned bomb warnings during violent rioting on a housing estate in the town of Craigavon, south of Belfast. The local PSNI commander denounced this as "a deliberate attempt to murder my officers" after they had been drawn into the area. Ten days earlier, a foot patrol near the border with the Irish Republic had a lucky escape after a rocket-propelled grenade fired at them by a man who had jumped from a passing car failed to detonate.

Subsequent forensic tests on the