“I don’t need any lectures about how serious this issue is, this is ongoing”, Minister Fitzgerald said.
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“We do not want to be left with one of the legacies of the peace process as being of a shadowy organisation that is involved in criminality and racketeering”, said Minister Burton.
The Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, said over the weekend the IRA had “gone away”. “If there’s people on holidays, they’re on holidays”. “Are they at the side of the stage or at the back of the stage?” she said.
Republicans will dismiss the surge in interest as politicking and there is a degree of justification in this assessment, given the proximity of the Republic’s next general election and Sinn Féin’s opinion poll popularity.
A “fresh assessment” of the IRA is needed after the Police Service of Northern Ireland remarked that the group still exists, Ireland’s Minister for Justice and Equality Frances Fitzgerald told Nóirín O’Sullivan, commissioner of Ireland’s police force Garda Síochána.
Tánaiste Joan Burton had earlier said the claim the provisional IRA has completely disbanded “leaves the question of where do they go?”.
The Ulster Unionist party in the north said its considering withdrawing from the northern executive because of the revelations. “If the minister has any information or suspicion of illegal activity, it is her duty to bring it to the gardaí instead of casting political smears”, Mr Stanley said.
The news of the IRA’s current existence in some capacity did not come as a surprise to the government, Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers has said, the BBC reported.
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On Tuesday afternoon, a 47-year-old man was arrested in Belfast as part of the PSNI investigation into the killing on 12 August.
