Editorial: Lurgan police station attack shows that violent dissident republicans, while despicable, thankfully have poor capabilities

Since the second IRA ceasefire of 1997, dissident republican terrorists have not made the breakthrough it seemed at times they might.​

The Omagh bomb happened months after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, and was the worst single atrocity of the Troubles. But dissidents then had few ‘successes’, as they would consider them, until the terrible Massereene Barracks killings in 2009.

That was the start of a grim period of attacks, that saw the policemen Stephen Carroll die, Peadar Heffron lose his legs and Ronan Kerr killed in 2011. However, the security situation did not markedly deteriorate then, as appeared to be happening.

The prison officer Adrian Ismay was killed in 2016 and the journalist Lyra McKee in 2019. Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell was seriously injured in a shooting three years ago. Even so, major dissident attacks remained small in number.

On Monday evening, there was another dissident attempted atrocity – a delivery driver forced at gunpoint to drive a vehicle with a bomb at Lurgan police station. Mercifully, it did not explode.

This was reminiscent of one of the more shocking killings of the Troubles, when Patsy Gillespie from Londonderry was forced by the IRA to drive as a human bomb at an army base.

The long Provisional IRA came to an end in the 1990s when it was clear that various, alternating terror tactics they used to force constitutional change had failed. Sadly, their political apologists, Sinn Fein, were rewarded by successive UK governments.

The dissident campaign has achieved almost nothing except heartbreak. It is encouraging to read that the device that they used in Lurgan is being described as crude, suggesting that they have poor capabilities.

Meanwhile, technology makes it ever harder for terrorists to carry out such crimes – another encouraging element in the current security situation.