Police shooting raises tension in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland's power-sharing agreement between Catholics and Protestants was facing its biggest test in over a decade yesterday after dissident republicans killed a policeman in a second attack.

The Continuity IRA, a small paramilitary splinter group, claimed responsibility for Monday night's shooting and said more blood would be shed as long as the province remained part of Britain.

The attack comes two days after another dissident group, the Real IRA, shot dead two British soldiers.

"Ireland's troubles are back," said Kevin Toolis, a film-maker and author of a book about the Irish Republican Army (IRA). "The Troubles are a euphemism for episodic shooting and affliction, unrest."

Politicians from all sides said the violence would not derail a 1998 power-sharing agreement that has brought relative calm and increasing prosperity to Northern Ireland after 30 years of bloodshed between minority Irish Republican Catholics and pro-British Protestants.

"This a battle of wills between a political class and evil, evil people and the political class will win," Northern Ireland's First Minister Peter Robinson said.

Two men, aged 17 and 37, were arrested in connection with the policeman's killing, police said yesterday. Police earlier said the younger man was 18.

The splinter groups do not have widespread support within the Catholic community in Northern Ireland and their membership is in the low hundreds but their actions have the potential to send the province spiralling back into tit-for-tat violence.

"That has to be a worry that there will be a reaction from loyalist paramilitaries who have more or less gone off the pitch," Ireland's Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said. "There is that danger."

There is also the risk that the dissidents will ramp up their campaign with a bombing.

In January, a large bomb was defused in Castlewellan, a town 50 km south of Northern Ireland's capital Belfast. "The Castlewellan bomb, which was intercepted, had the potential of another Omagh," said Mr Ahern.

Twenty-nine people were killed in the Real IRA's attack on the market town of Omagh in August 1998 in the deadliest single bombing of the sectarian conflict.