A total of 31 men have been shot in republican punishment attacks so far this year, according to statistics released by the RUC yesterday. The Provisional IRA has carried out most of these but a handful was carried out by splinter republican groups.
The RUC figures indicate that 122 so-called punishment attacks - 50 punishment shootings and 72 beatings - have been carried out by paramilitary groups so far this year.
The RUC has attributed 63 of these attacks to loyalists and 59 to republicans groups.
Republican paramilitaries have been blamed for 31 shootings, with loyalists blamed for a further 19 gun attacks.
Loyalists groups are suspected of having carried out 44 of the 72 beatings, with 28 attributed to republicans. Some of these attacks involved extraordinary levels of violence, with weapons from power tools to cudgels used to torture victims.
The killing of Mr Andy Kearney (33) in north Belfast on Sunday night is said by local sources to be the work of Provisional IRA members from west Belfast.
According to local sources, Mr Kearney had a fight with a Provisional IRA figure from west Belfast who had threatened to shoot him in revenge. According to his family, Mr Kearney had expressed concern to them that he was going to be shot.
On Sunday morning five men forced their way into his flat in New Lodge. One struck him with the butt of a rifle and another held a chloroform-soaked cloth over his face. He was then shot three times, once in the ankle and behind each knee, severing an artery.
The gunmen pulled out the telephone connection in his flat and blocked the lift at the ground floor so his family could not call for help. He was dead by the time an ambulance crew reached him.
Sinn Fein has refused to condemn the killing. The local Sinn Fein Assembly representative, Mr Gerry Kelly, who served a lengthy jail sentence for IRA-related crime, said the killing was "wrong" and "should not have happened".
Local SDLP and Alliance party representatives have called on the Sinn Fein leadership to stop the shootings and beatings. Mr Martin Morgan of the SDLP said the IRA was endangering the political process in the North by "playing into the hands of the anti-agreement or `No' campaigners".
Mr Philip McGarry of Alliance said: "[The] attempts by Sinn Fein to deny any responsibility for the killing of Mr Kearney carry no more credibility than the efforts of David Jones and Ian Paisley to claim that the Ballymoney killings were a random act."
The Mitchell Principles, which governed entry into the political process for parties such as Sinn Fein with associations with paramilitary organisations, include a specific reference to punishment killings and shootings, urging the parties to stop these attacks "and to take effective steps to prevent such actions". Earlier this year, Sinn Fein was suspended from the Stormont talks for a week after the Provisional IRA shot dead a Belfast drug dealer and a loyalist.
One of the worst of the republican incidents before the Kearney killing occurred on July 7th in Downpatrick, Co Down when four men broke into a house and shot a 22-year-old man seven times. Mrs Nancy Gracey of the anti-intimidation group, Outcry, who lives in Downpatrick, said yesterday the Provisional IRA carried out the shooting of the man at Russell Park.
She said the gunmen attempted what is known as a "50-50 job" on the man, shooting him in the small of the back with the intention of severing his spine and causing him paralysing injuries. The other six shots were to his legs, a process which Mrs Gracey said is known as a "six pack".
Remarkably, the young man, who was shot in front of his wife and three-year-old daughter, has recovered sufficiently to discharge himself from hospital. The incident which happened at the height of the Drumcree crisis was largely ignored by the media.
Mrs Gracey said the man's wife was held down by her hair and forced to watch the shooting at such close range that she suffered powder burns from the gun discharge. She accused the Sinn Fein leadership of hypocrisy, saying it was insufficient for them to say such incidents were "wrong" when they were capable of stopping the gunmen.
She said the Provisional IRA in Derry had also forced seven people to leave their homes in Creggan and Shantallow in April. Outcry was helping to relocate some of the people forced out of Derry, she said, but was hampered by a lack of finance from government sources. She said it appeared there was a policy of abandoning people caught in such predicaments.
The lack of any censure might have contributed to the increase in Provisional IRA shootings and beatings this year, according to several unionist figures who contacted Radio Ulster yesterday.
Figures compiled by Families Against Intimidation and Terror indicate a notable rise in the number of punishment shootings carried out by republican paramilitaries in the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 1997.
From the beginning of January to the end of June 1997, republicans carried out four punishment shootings. This number has risen to 30 such shootings carried out by republicans over the same period this year.
Loyalist punishment shootings decreased in the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year. Loyalists carried out 32 punishment shootings in the first six months of 1997.
Loyalist paramilitaries have carried out 17 punishment shootings in the first six months of 1998.