27 July 2026 - 7:00am
The crowning achievement of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was supposed to be that the murders would stop and the belligerents of the Troubles would lay down their arms. If those arms happened to be explosive, they would be decommissioned. For all the British state sacrificed during those negotiations — chiefly the amnesty of killers and terrorists — this, at least, it could take to the bank.
In 2005, assurances to this effect issued by the IRA were vouched for by the retired Canadian general John de Chastelain, who was then the head of the International Decommissioning Body. One British journalist was impertinent enough to smell a rat. “Aren’t you totally dependent on the IRA, without any independent evidence, to know whether guns have been retained for defensive purposes?” he asked de Chastelain during a press conference. After some deliberation, the general responded: “They have told us that they believe they have given us everything that they have, and we believe them.”
At the time, Republican violence had plummeted compared to the sanguinary peaks of the conflict. The naivety of de Chastelain’s remark may therefore have seemed somewhat academic. What’s a little credulity in the service of peace? Last week provided a definitive answer. An “extremely significant” bomb, in the words of Ireland’s Garda commissioner, Justin Kelly, was intercepted near Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, a short distance from the UK-Irish border. The device was reportedly military-grade Semtex, a remnant of the materials supplied to the IRA in the Eighties by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi — the same material that the IRA claimed had been surrendered.
The half-kilo of Semtex recovered — along with a timing power unit and detonator — was enough to “completely obliterate” a car, according to Garda detectives. The intended target remains unclear, but the interception occurred one day before Princess Anne visited Fermanagh last week. While there’s no evidence linking the two, one source familiar with Republican activities described this largely unremarked-upon coincidence as “one in a million”.
This incident is made more perplexing by the suspects charged in connection with it. Isobella Perrie Sullivan, a 25-year-old law student, and Simon O’Donovan, a 44-year-old employee of the National Museum of Ireland, have both been charged with possession of explosives. “These are not your normal suspects,” the source said. Though O’Donovan is rumoured to have connections with Republican dissidents, neither fits, from what is known, the profile of a typical IRA paramilitary member. Sullivan, who was arrested in the car transporting the bomb from the Republic of Ireland to the border, was, according to her lawyer, “manipulated” into transporting a bag without knowing the contents. She has reportedly been a member of an unknown political group, which her lawyer claims she has since stepped away from, and spent time in Syria.
If senior dissident Republicans, the most obvious cohort with access to these materials, convinced or manipulated this aspiring lawyer to transport a bomb, it might indicate their appeal to a more eclectic range of recruits than they have hitherto had access to. The facts, such as they are, also raise the question of whether the glorification of Republican violence via bands such as Kneecap is inspiring younger people who didn’t experience the Troubles first-hand to recapitulate them.
Another puzzling aspect to the case is the fact that many older IRA dissidents are involved in the drugs trade. “The last thing they want,” as one source put it, “is 40 armed cops at the door and more border security if your stuff is going across the border.” If a dissident Republican faction orchestrated the transfer of this bomb, it appears to be more ideologically motivated than its now largely mercantile old comrades. The one encouraging aspect of this murky mix of speculation and fact is that intelligence was passed to An Garda Síochána, allowing officers to intercept the bomb before it was detonated. This suggests that some of those comrades, at least, are equally motivated in the opposite direction.
Michael Murphy is a journalist and documentary filmmaker covering immigration and international affairs.
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