Where will Real IRA threats lead? Not very far

In an obvious sense the Real IRA's threat to start murdering bankers is a sinister development. But in another, Henry McDonald's account in today's Guardian of his dealings with the republican splinter group is PG Wodehouse stuff.

All that stuff about a memory stick wrapped in a surgical glove lodged in a toilet bowl should be enough to cheer the hardest heart. Let's hope that putting it there left tell-tale turd on someone's balaclava.

And only a very self-absorbed little group of narcissists would fail to spot the irony of a self-styled IRA attacking the "criminal " activity of bankers, not least their willingness to "grease the politicians palms".

After all, the IRA's own longstanding habit of robbing banks to fund all sorts of activities – including politics – showed only marginally less finesse. As recently as 2004, £26.5m was stolen from the Northern Bank's Belfast vaults in a heist widely attributed to an IRA operation.

There have been plenty of precedents, along with kidnapping, fuel laundering, drug-running and assorted racketeering – along with murder, of course. Investment banking, by comparison, is almost a respectable career.

What does the latest threat tell us and where will it lead? On the basis of what is known about the logistical capacity of the RIRA and its micro-rivals, not very much and not very far. The history of similar outbreaks of Robin Hood terrorism – in Spain, Italy or Germany for instance – does not suggest it is a winning formula; quite the reverse.

That does not mean there will be no attacks on banks or bankers in the City of London – "financing Britain's colonialist and capitalist system" – or on softer targets beyond. After all, they did it before in the 90s and also tried to mortar John Major's cabinet in session.

In the meantime they administer tabloid-style "rough justice" to antisocial elements in working class nationalist areas. It would be a small comfort – though almost certainly misleading – to imagine that such behaviour is driven by high-minded Puritanism. It's much more likely to be psychotic and power/money-driven.

At this point it's worth a sideways glance at yesterday's coincidental report on the murder by the INLA – another republican offshoot – of Billy Wright, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) turned Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) mass murderer in the Maze prison in December 1997.

The 700-page, £30m five-year inquiry rejects conspiracy in favour of cock-up to explain the hit on "King Rat", and will therefore disappoint the usual suspects.

Wright, whom only his family need mourn, is more interesting as a type: the man with a talent for fighting who can't adjust to the inevitability of eventual negotiations and the kind of peace, solid but tense, which Northern Ireland currently enjoys.

Wars between states throw up many of them, sad figures in later life. Wright was an active opponent of the peace process that London and Dublin nurtured in the 90s – a sell-out, he said. The Real IRA feels the same.

Wright is now dead, a thought the RIRA might usefully ponder. They have the capacity to cause trouble disproportionate to their numbers – 300 between all the splinter groups? – but are not going anywhere.

A United Ireland is not even the economic attraction it was to some a few years ago before the Celtic Tiger choked on cheap borrowing. The Republic of Ireland hovers closer to bankruptcy than any of us should wish. Scope there for revived radicalism? Maybe, but I doubt it.

The wider question is why a crude appeal to anti-capitalist direct action of the most direct kind seems unlikely to resonate. It didn't in more propitious times.

As Henry McDonald reminds readers, the Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Fraction (RAF) Gang, an even weirder bunch of bourgeois fantasists in retrospect than they appeared at their 70s peak, were offshoots of the rebellious 60s, much like their Italian counterparts, the Red Brigades.

At a stretch their kind of "urban guerrilla" operation could be linked with the American Weathermen and – gosh, I almost forgot – the Simbionese Liberation Army (SLA) which in 1974 kidnapped Patty Hearst (19), the media heiress, getting her to take part in (yes) a bank robbery. These guys love banks!

Hearst was caught on camera. It was all very radical chic, though not all of the urban guerrilla movement's heroes, political or intellectual, would stand up to robust scrutiny now.

They killed a few VIP targets (in 1978 the Red Brigades murdered Aldo Mori, a former PM), but rather more ordinary folk. They too robbed banks and identified themselves with the Hollywood version of Bonnie and Clyde – itself a suitably ironic point since it glamourised a pair of small town, unsuccessful hoods who didn't look much like Warren Beatty or Faye Dunaway.

I liked the movie too, though it was obviously a sentimental fraud. In 2010 the sentimental fraud who is doing so well at the box office is Sarah Palin, whose wilder Tea Party adherents scored another success over a mainstream Republican candidate in Delaware overnight.

It may offer a chance of salvation to the beleaguered Democrats and their author-president. But I doubt if they are betting on it. The public mood there is angry and vocally reactionary. Here it is fearful and unlikely to take more than brief, grim satisfaction from the sight of a shot investment banker, his wife and chauffeur, possibly their kids too.

Curiously, the Real IRA has raised its flag days after the Basque separatists, Eta, declared their long war with the Spanish state to be over. They too killed bankers as well as civilians and soldiers, rather fewer – just over 800 – than the 2,000 murdered (out of 3,600 victims overall) killed by republican groups in the Troubles. Spain has 20% unemployment, yet Eta does not seem to see it as an opportunity.

Little wonder? Thirty years after the Red Brigades murdered Aldo Mori Italy is run by Silvio Berlusconi, a PG Wodehouse Italian politician if ever there was one. But no one's laughing.