Editorial: ​Northern Ireland needs a tough response to dissident terror after attacks on police stations

​The bomb attack on a police station in Dunmurry by dissident Irish republican terrorists is part of a long tradition of such attacks.

​The incident is particularly concerning given that the suspected group involved, a so-called New IRA, also made an attempt at Lurgan PSNI station recently.

It is in no way complacent to point out that such attacks are much harder to carry out than they once were, principally because it is very difficult indeed for the perpetrators to avoid detection in such a digital age.

The police will now be poring over CCTV, which is prevalent almost everywhere now, looking at approaches to the Dunmurry attack scene.

Dissidents have flared up in their violence at numerous points over the last 30 years, when their predecessors in the Provisional IRA gave up their own terror.

The ongoing republican factions still have much less support.

Even so, there are many things to be worried about with regard to the current situation.

One is a wider greening of public opinion within nationalism on both sides of the border. The number of people who remember the Troubles in any significant way, which is people over the age of 50 who tend to begin only to remember events from well into the 1980s after the worst violence is over, declines each year and is now a minority of the population. Thus the romanticising of IRA terror obscures the fact that it was roundly condemned by nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Republic who lived through it.

Another worry is the hopelessly weak bail and sentencing policy that applies to dangerous dissidents.

It is the UK government that must take the lead in making clear that it will not accept NI adopting a weak response to terrorism in any part of the nation.