N. Ireland peace holds, for now

It sounds like the opening of a Hollywood movie: a bank heist where the robbers don't even enter the bank. Instead Belfast bank employees are coerced to do the dirty work. They swipe £26 million ($49 million), one of the biggest hauls in British history. [Editor's note: The original version of this story misstated the dateline.]

But the December bank job took on serious political overtones earlier this month when police accused the Irish Republican Army (IRA) of masterminding the crime. And the Independent Monitoring Commission, an international panel of experts, ruled last week that the IRA command had sanctioned a wide range of violent and illegal activities, including the bank robbery.

The recriminations have plunged the province's seven-year peace process into one of its gravest crises.

The IRA took offense at the suggestion it was a criminal outfit and withdrew its offer to disarm. Its political wing, Sinn Fein, pointed to a lack of evidence and said the episode was a smoke screen to mask lack of peace-process progress; but their opponents fulminated over the IRA's "criminal empire."

Indeed, Wednesday, the relatives of a man stabbed to death two weeks ago asked the United States for help in finding his attackers. The victim's family, which is Catholic, accused the IRA of shielding the killers, and called upon the Sinn Fein "to bring all its influence to bear to ensure that these individuals have nowhere to hide."

The two incidents are putting new pressure on the Sinn Fein.

"This has been one of the most severe setbacks because the degree of trust between Republicans and unionists has been fundamentally damaged," says Henry Patterson, professor of politics at the University of Ulster and author of a political history of the IRA.

But while the rhetoric is as furious as ever, something appears to have changed in Northern Ireland in the past few years. "There was a time when people thought [events like this] would precipitate a return to violence," says Mr. Patterson, "but now they accept that we're not going back to how it was in the 1970s and 1980s and direct rule [from London] is livable with in both communities."

Trust between Northern Ireland republicans, who want a united Ireland, and unionists, who want to preserve rule from Britain, has proven elusive. A generation of violence in which more than 3,000 people were killed gave way to paramilitary cease-fires in the 1990s and a political process designed to bring the two groups together in a locally run government.

But mutual suspicions over disarmament and activities of groups like the IRA have repeatedly undermined the power-sharing deal. Efforts to restore the local authorities late last year foundered in a row over the arrangements for the IRA to decommission weapons.

For the IRA, the accusations over the bank job were the last straw. "We do not intend to remain quiescent within this unacceptable and unstable situation. It has tried our patience to the limit," the organization said in a statement that bore more than the usual trace of menace.

Page: 1 | 2