Ciarán Dunbar

speaker

167 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 16 Sep

Ciarán Dunbar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Crime World · New IRA: Republican terror group active on both sides of the border · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

He himself was murdered.

So the organisation has and has had a very significant presence in the Republic, but mainly active in the north, of course.

And I think almost everyone will remember what happened on the 18th of April 2019.

There was rioting in the Cregan area of Derry.

A gunman opened fire on a police cordon and journalist, 29-year-old journalist, Learie McKee, was struck by a bullet and fatally wounded.

The new IRA later admitted that, describing it as a mistake, although while several people have been prosecuted in connection to that killing, no one has ever been convicted of her murder.

And people will also remember the attack on John Caldwell.

The new IRA targeted the PSNI detective chief inspector in Oma.

He'd just finished coaching a youth football team when two gunmen approached him and shot him multiple times.

in front of several young children, including his son.

He survived that attack, of course.

But in March 2024, the terror threat level in Northern Ireland was lowered from severe to substantial.

So we did think, Robin, that this group, if not fading away, had suffered severe setbacks.

There had been an assessment by many people that due to modern intelligence gathering and all of the technology which was connected with that, not to mention the use of informers, that this organisation had really been damaged to the point that it could no longer effectively operate.

We know that MI5 is a very sophisticated spy operation, very sophisticated intelligence organisation, but the Gardaí would also have been keeping a very close eye on the new IRA.

What sort of operations would the Gardaí have been carrying out against them?

In your words there, keep a good eye on them.

Is that just about basic police work, observing demonstrations, political meetings, things like that?

Or do the Gardaí also extensively use informers?

And how sophisticated would the electronic intelligence gathering techniques used by the Gardaí be?

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