Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA have being playing a game of political brinkmanship with the British and Irish governments for at least the last couple of years. The IRA has also conducted a number of operations that have seriously undermined the peace process. The recent $50 million bank robbery that the IRA is now accused of is but the latest example. Most infamously, the IRA conducted an espionage operation from the Sinn Fein offices, located in the Northern Ireland assembly building, while the leadership of that party were actually ministers in the fledgling Northern Ireland government. That debacle almost led to the collapse of the entire peace process and led directly to the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly by the UK government in order to avert the crumbling political process from fracturing altogether, perhaps irretrievably.

There seems no doubt in the minds of the Northern Irish Police Service that the IRA was responsible for the largest bank robbery in UK history. No other organization in Ulster has the wherewithal to carry out such a crime and the modus operandi of the crime bore all the hallmarks of the IRA. Even if this crime were committed by a purely criminal group, it is highly unlikely that the crime could have been planned and executed without the knowledge, and probably the sanction, of the IRA, whose own grassroots intelligence network is better than that of the authorities. The IRA can, therefore, protest as much as it wants about being wrongly accused of this crime, few even among the Catholic community suspect that the IRA was responsible.