Extremely Significant

The wars in Ukraine and with Iran mean that there will be little relief from the cost of living crisis for the foreseeable future, so a lid needs to be kept on any popular dissent. It is time for a security emergency, so here come the dissident Republicans.

Anyone who thinks that those are off-the-books operations of the IRA is just making it up, and if questioned, on this as on any issue, will usually produce some anecdote that made him look like the central historical figure of the last however many decades, or at least in possession of peerless expertise. It is a Boomer thing.

On Northern Ireland, such people cannot forgive those who live there for rarely being as Unionist as they were, and almost never in the same doolally integrationist way that Jeffrey Donaldson led into the DUP, nor can they forgive the people who voted for Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell while living 24 hours a day with the Troubles in London, whereas they themselves caught the train home to the Home Counties from which they have now worked for years. No bomb would go off anywhere near them. 

Like the Loyalist paramilitaries, if the dissident Republicans did not exist, then our rulers would have to invent them. And at different times, those did not used to exist. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime in general, and in drug-dealing in particular, leading to generations of professional and social interaction of the kind that also takes place routinely among, for example, rival Mafia families, when they are not letting each others' blood without mercy.

There has never been any secret that the Loyalist organisations were undeclared agencies of the British State, while the old IRA was also riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The documentaries about David Rupert, and about "Robert" by the superlative Peter Taylor, undeniably broke ground, and were a reminder of how good the BBC could be, but they could not have surprised anyone. That is all unconnected to any sincere pursuit of a United Ireland. There will always be dissidents of one sort or another. They are too useful for there ever to be allowed not to be.