Word: ireland
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...town," built in the 1960s and promoted as an urban utopia, Craigavon looks like the forlorn kind of place where nothing ever happens. Last night, just 48 hours after the murder of two British soldiers by a dissident republican terrorist group, it saw the kind of action Northern Ireland thought it had left behind for good. A policeman, Constable Stephen Paul Carroll, was shot dead in a nationalist area of the town - northern Irish conurbations still tend to be divided along political and religious lines. Carroll was the first officer to be shot dead in Northern Ireland for 12 years...
...Real IRA' is believed to have carried out the attack. The group is one of a number of so-called dissident republicans - hardliners who oppose the power-sharing government between Northern Ireland's Protestant and Catholic political parties. The 'Real IRA' was also responsible for the Omagh bomb which claimed 29 lives in 1998 - the bloodiest atrocity in Northern Ireland's 30-year sectarian conflict...
...similar note, Sir Hugh Orde, Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), revealed last week that he had called in reinforcements to help counter the threat posed by dissident republicans. Orde announced the British Army's Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) was supporting the PSNI with surveillance and intelligence-gathering duties. This was heavily criticized by Catholic politicians, some of whom raised the specter of British troops returning to the streets of Northern Ireland. Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein called the SRR deployment "dangerous and stupid...
...after Saturday's murders in Antrim, Sinn Fein may be forced to eat their words. During the Troubles, the party normally refused to condemn the murder of security force personnel, but in today's post-conflict Northern Ireland, the rules of the game have changed. The party's president Gerry Adams described the attacks as "wrong and counter-productive." "[The perpetrators] want to destroy the progress of recent times and to plunge Ireland back into conflict", he said...
...unlikely that Saturday night's murders will derail the peace process. The communal will to avoid a return to the dark days of the Troubles is simply too strong. Yet, until Saturday night, there had been no major terrorist incident to try the collective will of Northern Ireland's most recent power-sharing executive. With the contentious issue of security at the top of the political agenda once again, the cracks in Northern Ireland's fractious devolved government may widen even further...