Report: IRA has ceased attacks

Great Britain agreed to restore funding to an IRA-linked party.
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- The Irish Republican Army has ceased many threatening activities, including vigilante attacks and training new members, but remains involved in pervasive criminal rackets that will prove extremely difficult to suppress, international experts said Wednesday in a long-awaited report.
Britain and Ireland published and welcomed the findings from the Independent Monitoring Commission, a four-man panel that assesses the activities of the IRA and other outlawed paramilitary groups on behalf of both governments.
The report came three months after the IRA declared it had abandoned its decades-old campaign to overthrow Northern Ireland by force, and one month after disarmament officials followed up that historic declaration by confirming they had scrapped the IRA's hidden weapons stockpiles.
Both events have raised hopes that negotiations to revive the major goal of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord -- a joint Roman Catholic-Protestant administration -- can be resumed soon.
Funding restored
Britain took the experts' broadly positive findings on the IRA as a cue to reward Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party that represents most Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Peter Hain, the British government minister responsible for governing the territory, said he would restore more than $700,000 in annual taxpayer funding.
The financial aid had been withheld from Sinn Fein for more than a year because of IRA involvement in a range of violent and criminal activities -- including, the experts say, a British-record $50 million robbery of a Belfast bank. The IRA has denied having any role in the Dec. 20 robbery.
Leaders of Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority reacted with disgust to Hain's decision to restore funding. They argued that Sinn Fein did not need British taxpayer aid when its IRA partners already possessed tens of millions in cash and assets.
Agreement
Britain, Ireland, Protestant leaders and the fact-finding commissioners did agree on one key point: Much more time will have to pass before they can be confident the IRA is really withdrawing from "all activities," as IRA commanders proclaimed July 28.
Wednesday's published report covered the March-August period -- in other words, just five weeks testing the IRA's peace pledge. The commissioners said their next report, in January, would be more important in testing IRA intentions.
Democratic Unionist chairman Nigel Dodds, whose party represents most Protestants in Northern Ireland, said the IRA "has much, much more to do to prove that it really has given up all forms of terror and criminality for good. One month in a terrorist campaign of over 35 years is a mere drop in the ocean."
Richard Kerr, a former acting CIA director who sits on the commission, said the IRA's involvement in myriad rackets, most prominently the sale of smuggled fuel and cigarettes, "increases the complexity of their threat to the rule of law."
Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.