IRA Dissidents Declare an End to Cease-Fire

Breakaway members of the Irish Republican Army declared the group’s cease-fire over Saturday, a day before IRA supporters vote on whether to accept Northern Ireland’s proposed peace accord.

“The cease-fire, as called by the old leadership, is over and our war machine will once again be directed against the British,” the dissidents declared in a coded statement to Ireland’s two major newspapers, the Irish Independent and Irish Times.

Their defiant challenge came as the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party planned to take a fundamental step away from bloody revolution and toward peaceful reform within Northern Ireland, a British-ruled, Protestant-majority state it once pledged to destroy.

Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness will seek full backing for the compromise accord from an estimated 1,000 party activists today in Dublin, the Irish capital.

In the statement, the splinter group said it considers itself the “true” IRA. It said it recently elected a new “caretaker” command and wouldn’t use any name other than IRA when claiming responsibility for attacks.

Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said police and military intelligence in both parts of Ireland will monitor the activities of the small dissident band “to thwart whatever they try to do.”

Led by an IRA officer formerly responsible for controlling hidden weapons caches, the breakaway group was formed last year after a majority of the IRA leadership supported a July 1997 truce and Sinn Fein entered the peace talks.

In February, the group set off bombs in two predominantly Protestant towns in Northern Ireland. Last month, members were caught trying to smuggle a car bomb into Britain, and soldiers recently defused another car bomb near Belfast, the provincial capital.

Sinn Fein until now has avoided formal acceptance of the deal--struck by it April 10 along with seven other parties and the British and Irish governments--because of the potential for a damaging split within IRA and Sinn Fein ranks.