Threats against banks by the Real IRA are the first time that any dissident republican terror group in recent years has deployed overtly anti-capitalist language. It reflects a desire to tap into widespread, burning discontent with the banks and the banking system on the island of Ireland as a means to gain new support.
Whether or not the Real IRA would or could take its bellicose warnings against financial institutions a lethal step further remains to be seen. But its pointed attack on banks and bankers is the first time in years that any western European terror organisation has singled out any key sector of the capitalist system.
The track record of European terrorist groups who indulge in anti-capitalist threats does not bode well for the Real IRA. Back in the early 1990s, the third generation of ultra-leftist terrorists that were inspired by the Baader-Meinhof gang carried out a brief but bloody campaign of violence in reunited Germany. At a time when capitalism seemed triumphant after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Red Army Faction (RAF) mark three targeted business executives associated with the privatisation of vast sectors of East German industry.
The strategy of the resurgent RAF was to exploit anger in east Germany over the activities of the Treuhand agency, whose privatisation of former state enterprises was putting tens of thousands of people out of work.
The targeting and murder of a number of leading business figures, however, did not precipitate any revolutionary situation in the former East Germany. Rather, the campaign was widely condemned and led to the defeat of the RAF and its eventual disbandment. Disaffected workers in the east did not flow into the arms of revolutionary ultra-leftists in the early years of reunification.
Basque terror group Eta's armed campaign over the last decade is probably more akin to the Real IRA's "war" than Germany's RAF. Both Eta and the Real IRA target institutions and representatives of what they see as occupying powers in a series of on/off campaigns of sabotage and assassination. Indeed, Eta's violent campaign has been petering out of late due to security co-operation between French and Spanish police. Eta activists have been arrested on both sides of the Pyrenees, while police in Portugal earlier this year closed down a major Eta arms base. Eta has recently declared a ceasefire from a position of weakness.
The Real IRA has shown a capacity to recover from heavy losses of personnel and the international opprobrium heaped upon it after the 1998 Omagh bomb massacre. Its targets over the past 18 months have included British soldiers preparing for a tour of duty in Afghanistan; Catholic police officers; young men allegedly engaged in so-called antisocial behaviour in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland; off-duty British Army officers; and MI5's regional headquarters in Holywood, County Down. If the organisation was to go a step further than just hostile rhetoric, it would mark a whole new level in terrorist strategy.
As with all armed insurgent groups success is always built in the end on the support they can draw from the indigenous population. There is some evidence that the Real IRA has been receiving help and assistance from younger people in the alienated nationalist underclass. None the less, the vast majority of nationalists both in Northern Ireland and the Republic are fed up with conflict and are fully behind peaceful, democratic solutions to divisions on the island.
