Links to IRA Seen in Rash of Violence in N. Ireland

Hooded intruders shot Francis Collins in his fish and chips shop. They murdered Martin McCrory through his living room window as he watched television. They shotgunned Ian Lyons as he sat in his car with his girlfriend, Sheena McAlinden. His last words were, “Sheena, I’m dead.”

It is just over a month since President Clinton visited and appealed for reconciliation among Protestants and Roman Catholics--and only a day away from the arrival of another U.S. delegation--but hopes raised in both communities are already as muffled as the pedestrians hurrying through wet, wind-swept Belfast.

Irish Republican Army gunmen have returned with a bang to the gray winter streets of Northern Ireland, mocking stalled efforts to forge a lasting peace in this British province tormented by more than two decades of ethnic bloodshed.

Vigilante murders and punishment beatings attributed to enforcers from the IRA are carried out against drug dealers and petty criminals in the IRA’s own Catholic community.

It is violence with a pointed message that has dangerously eroded political patience as well as the fragile cease-fire begun more than 16 months ago. It could short-circuit diplomatic maneuvering toward all-party peace talks.

And it could not come at a worse time for the rewakening land or for the British, Irish and U.S. governments, all committed to a search for peace.

An international commission headed by former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) will revisit Belfast on Saturday before making final proposals later this month on disarming Catholic and Protestant terrorist gangs as a prelude to a formal search for a political accord.

The IRA, which says it will not surrender any weapons, disclaims responsibility for the reborn violence that has brought five murders in as many weeks and a round of savage beatings on Catholic turf. Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, says it does not condone the attacks. But neither does it condemn them.

In all, there have been seven execution-style murders since April. A group calling itself Direct Action Against Drugs claims responsibility.

Is this a new killer band that has materialized overnight in Catholic areas long controlled by the IRA?

No way, local authorities say. “These murders are being sanctioned and carried out by the IRA,” said Northern Ireland police Chief Hugh Annesley.

Joe Herndon, a moderate Parliament member from Catholic West Belfast, said, “I think the very dogs in the street know it’s the IRA that are doing this.”

One major dealer, Mickey “Moneybags” Mooney, was killed in April, and another man was gunned down in September. The killings resumed at a one-a-week pace within days after Clinton’s visit.

David Trimble, parliamentary leader for the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest Protestant political party, thinks Clinton angered IRA hard-liners by saying the days of violence in Northern Ireland are over.

“That stung them into the response we have seen in the last five weeks,” said Trimble, who calls the violence “a deliberate decision of the leadership of Sinn Fein/IRA to resume the use of arms. . . . This is not a group of people carrying out a crusade against drug dealers. . . . It is an effort by the IRA to maintain control and to get money.”

Sinn Fein Chairman Mitchel McLaughlin insists there is no evidence to link the IRA to the execution-style killings. Like other Sinn Fein spokesmen, he blames the violence on community frustration in the absence of “acceptable policing.”

Police spokesman David Hanna says both republican and loyalist paramilitary groups are short of funds, and their self-proclaimed war against crime is really a mask behind which they hope to win a piece of underworld action.

“The IRA seems more interested in a kind of licensing or franchising agreement with dealers than in direct involvement. The loyalists, by contrast, are more hands-on,” Hanna said. Sinn Fein spokesmen deny the accusation.

People in Northern Ireland are worried, but, by the standard of any U.S. city, drugs are a minor problem in Belfast.

“When people talk about drugs here, it is usually Ecstasy pills and marijuana,” said Hanna. Heroin seizures in 1995 dropped to one-half kilo from 1 kilo in 1994. In 1994, police seized 34 grams of cocaine; last year, it was 4 grams.

Reorganization of the overwhelmingly Protestant police force--the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or RUC--is a key political demand among IRA supporters, many of whom consider the green-uniformed police an arm of British repression. Republicans in predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland seek the union of the province with the Catholic Irish Republic.

The IRA, like its counterpart Protestant paramilitary groups, has long exacted vigilante justice in poor areas where its support is strongest.

“In the ‘70s, the fashion was to smash hands with concrete blocks. Now it is more systematic beatings and murders. They see themselves as judge, jury and executioner,” said Seamus McKendry, who heads a group called Families of the Disappeared. It demands that the IRA reveal the dumping grounds for the bodies of 14 Catholics, including McKendry’s mother-in-law, who have been kidnapped and murdered by vigilantes over the years.

After a generation of struggle that claimed more than 3,000 lives, the IRA declared a cease-fire on Sept. 1, 1994. Loyalist paramilitary groups followed suit six weeks later. By official reckoning, the cease-fire remains in place: There have been no bombings nor armed attacks by one side against the other.

The reduction of violence has helped stoke encouraging economic growth, but the peace has been relative. Vandalism and arson against Protestant meeting halls and Catholic churches is a popular pastime. And police count 170 beatings of Catholics by IRA vigilantes, 68 of Protestants by loyalist terrorists.

Typically, punishment is administered in dark of night by hooded men wielding baseball bats, iron bars, hammers and nail-studded clubs. They focus on knees, thighs, elbows, ankles or the spine--in what is known as a 50/50, an even chance that the victim will either die or be crippled.

Denise Clarkin, 16, was tied to a lamppost, had her hair cut off and had paint splattered on her head: Her sister had irritated someone. Mullachy Clark, 16, a glue-sniffer, was attacked on a Belfast street in October by half a dozen men who poured the glue in his hair and sent him to the hospital with a broken nose and a ruptured eardrum. Last month, the teenager hanged himself, leaving behind a note saying the IRA had driven him to suicide.

The ransacking of houses and shouted demands that someone leave a neighborhood--or the country--are among punishments levied by vigilantes enforcing their own law or settling old scores. One of the recent murder victims was a former IRA commander with no known drug ties who may have quarreled with the organization.

In fact, vigilante marauding may exceed official reports of it. People come in dispirited procession to the downtown headquarters of a community action group called Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT).

“We see as many as 20 families a week. Someone’s been attacked, or they’ve been intimidated. They want advice, support, help to find somewhere else to live,” said FAIT’s Gary James.

Ian Williamson, police commander in West Belfast, calls beatings and murders “the antithesis of justice. It has everything to do with paramilitary organizations seeking desperately to try and maintain power and control over what they perceive to be their community.”