The public should not underestimate the threat posed by dissident paramilitaries to the peace process, the RUC Chief Constable said yesterday.
At the launch of the force's annual report, Sir Ronnie Flanagan stressed it would be the last report in the name of the RUC due to police reform and the introduction of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He said dissident republicans had attempted a whole range of mortar attacks, bombings and shootings, including the recent milk-churn bomb find by gardai at the Border.
"Fortunately our success and the success of our colleagues in the Garda Siochana has thwarted their intentions. The risk is that actually leads to a public complacency that these people pose a real threat. The truth is they pose a very real threat."
Commenting on the possibility of violence at Drumcree on Sunday week during the Orange Order standoff, he predicted disturbances on a "similar level to last year" rather than the intense violence witnessed previously.
He had no intelligence to suggest loyalist paramilitary organisations were planning wide spread disruption over July, "but I am not going to be so naive as the say that is not a possibility". He said the development by loyalists of sophisticated "keyhole" bomb devices was worrying.
Sir Ronnie added he had no evidence decommissioning by the IRA was imminent. He said the main paramilitary organisations, while they continued to adhere to their definition of a cessation of military operations, continued to engage in a whole range of criminality.
"They still retain their weapons and thus the capacity to kill, injure and terrorise." He said a "normal policing environment" had yet to be created in the North.
"The people of Northern Ireland have endured enough of this malevolence over the past 30 years and it serves no cause whatsoever except the evil purposes that these individuals and groups seek to pursue for their own wicked and selfish rea sons," said Sir Ronnie.
The Chief Constable's report for 2000/01 detailed 119,912 offences recorded by police, an almost identical number to the year previous. However, the clearance rate of crimes fell from 30.2 per cent to 27.1 per cent. "This must be viewed against a backdrop of diminishing resources."
Statistics for the year ending in March detailed 18 killings compared with seven the previous year. The 177 bombing incidents during the year compared with 66 in the previous year.
Sir Ronnie also emphasised his concern with a projected 20.7 per cent funding cut in police resources over the next there years. The police spending for 2000/01 was £652.9 million.
"This is a position I am certainly not happy with, especially during a period in which the Police Service is experiencing significant change arising from the Patten Report. Should such appropriate additional funding not be made available, I have no doubt the required cuts would severely impact on our ability to maintain basic services over the three-year period," he said.
Sir Ronnie also described comments by the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, that none of more than 2,000 Catholic applicants to the new police service was republican or nationalist as "very presumptuous". "I certainly would never be so presumptuous as to begin to ask people which way they vote. I think it's not right if young Catholic men and women decide to come forward to pursue a police career for people to then begin to question which political party they may or may not support."
The RUC Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, presenting the RUC's annual report in Belfast yesterday. He said he had no intelligence to suggest loyalist paramilitary organisations were planning widespread disruption next month.