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Police: Dissidents might try attacks as N. Ireland marks peace

Published:Saturday | April 8, 2023 | 12:35 AM
Victims and survivors of the Troubles gather in Killough, Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland to watch the sun rise to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Friday April 7, 2023. This month marks 25 years since the Good Friday Agre
AP
Victims and survivors of the Troubles gather in Killough, Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland to watch the sun rise to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Friday April 7, 2023. This month marks 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement largely ended bloodshed that left 3,600 people dead, some 50,000 wounded and thousands bereaved.

LONDON (AP):

Police have warned that armed dissident groups are planning violent attacks over the Easter holiday weekend as Northern Ireland marks 25 years since the peace accord that ended three decades of bloodshed.

US President Joe Biden is due to visit Belfast next week as Northern Ireland commemorates the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. The US-brokered deal got Irish republican and British loyalist paramilitary groups to lay down their arms and set up a power-sharing government for Northern Ireland.

The peace accord largely ended 30 years of violence, known as “the Troubles”, in which 3,600 people died, but small splinter groups mount occasional gun or bomb attacks on the security forces.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland Assistant Chief Constable Bobby Singleton said police had received intelligence about planned violence around a parade in Londonderry on Easter Monday commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland.

He said there was “potential for dissidents to try and draw us in to disorder and then experience tells us where that happens, that can quite often become the platform for an attack on our officers.”

Police Chief Constable Simon Byrne said police officers, military personnel and prison staff, and their families, were the dissidents’ main targets.

“The style of attack that we are dealing with and trying to frustrate is gun attacks and bomb attacks on these people by a small number of determined dissident terrorists,” he said Thursday.

Key players in the talks that led to the peace accord gathered at Stormont, the seat of the mothballed assembly, on Friday for a ceremony to mark the anniversary.

Gerry Adams, former leader of the IRA-linked party Sinn Fein, said the 1988 agreement had saved “countless” lives.

“We’re all in a better place and despite current challenges, the future is bright,” Adams said.

Former Ulster Unionist Party leader Reg Empey, who also attended the ceremony, said young people in Northern Ireland now “are the second generation that has grown up in this country who have no working knowledge of what violence and our Troubles meant.”

“If there’s nothing else it has achieved, that in itself is a victory,” Empey said.