Real Irish Republican Army

The Real Irish Republican Army is presented as an armed dissident group that claimed responsibility for the 7 March 2009 shootings at Massereene Barracks. The episode shows the persistence of armed republicanism after the political landscape had shifted toward electoral participation and reconciliation. The book connects the group to a claim of responsibility and to Marian Price’s later arrest and imprisonment, but does not set out its founding, internal structure, or command arrangements.

Political setting

The organization’s appearance belongs to a longer conflict in which peaceful protest, armed struggle, and electoral politics competed as routes to political change. The Belfast-to-Derry march of January 1969 protested discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, where exclusion from desirable jobs and housing was accompanied by a lack of executive power. Some marchers believed peaceful protest could expose injustice and help redraw political divisions; violence at Burntollet Bridge later altered the outlook of Dolours Price and Marian Price. In 1971, Dolours joined the Provisional IRA, regarding the decision as a return to her family’s republican convictions. The account presents that trajectory as background to a movement’s changing strategies, not as evidence that the sisters founded or led the Real Irish Republican Army.

The political contrast sharpened in the years that followed. During the 1981 hunger strike, the proposed candidacy of Bobby Sands represented a consequential departure from republican abstentionism: an imprisoned hunger striker might use an election to bring public attention and pressure to bear. Gerry Adams later pursued electoral politics, and Dolours campaigned for him in West Belfast in 1983, canvassing and taking voters to polling stations. By contrast, Dolours could not commit herself to republican splinter groups that remained devoted to violence. Marian did not share that restraint. The book records her later defence of armed struggle as having a place in the present and future, a position that placed her at odds with the political turn surrounding the Good Friday Agreement.

Massereene Barracks attack

On the night of 7 March 2009, two young British soldiers went to the gatehouse at Massereene Barracks to collect pizza before departing for a six-month tour in Afghanistan. Two delivery cars arrived, followed by a green sedan. Two masked gunmen opened fire, then approached the soldiers and shot them at close range. They fired more than sixty rounds in roughly half a minute and escaped in the sedan. The soldiers, Patrick Azimkar, aged twenty-one, and Mark Quinsey, aged twenty-three, were killed. Two other soldiers and both delivery drivers were wounded.

The attack was especially striking because twelve years had passed since the last British soldier was killed in Northern Ireland. In a telephone call to a Dublin newspaper, the Real Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility. Its spokesman also treated the delivery drivers as legitimate targets, arguing that they were collaborating with the British by servicing the soldiers. That justification extended the organization’s definition of a target beyond the military personnel it had attacked: the delivery workers were injured civilians, including a local man and an immigrant from Poland. The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s chief constable described the attackers as a small and increasingly desperate group seeking to pull a community back toward conflict it did not want.

Investigation and Marian Price

The shootings prompted a major investigation and several arrests. Eight months after the attack, armed police entered a house in Andersonstown after tracing the phone used to claim responsibility. It was a pay-as-you-go phone bought at a Tesco supermarket in Newtownabbey the day after the shooting. CCTV showed Marian Price purchasing it: as she reached into her wallet at the checkout, she looked up toward the camera. This identification connected her to the phone used in the claim of responsibility, but the account does not establish that she was one of the gunmen.

After two days of questioning about the barracks shooting, Marian was released without charge. Eighteen months later, authorities detained her again. She was charged with providing property for terrorist purposes and faced a further charge connected to a dissident rally in Derry. At the rally, a masked Real Irish Republican Army man read a statement threatening police officers with execution; Marian stood beside him, unmasked, holding his script. The scenes provide evidence of her association with the group’s public actions and messaging, without resolving her precise organizational role.

Conflict after the political turn

Marian remained in prison for two years, including long periods in solitary confinement. Her health deteriorated: her psoriasis worsened and she lost weight. Dolours joined a campaign for her sister’s release, with letters and small rallies echoing the earlier effort to free the Price sisters. But the campaign attracted less republican support than it had decades before. The contrast was political as well as personal: Marian had not moved on from armed struggle, while the wider context had changed toward compromise and reconciliation.

The Real Irish Republican Army’s claim for the Massereene attack thus appears in a narrative of a movement divided over what should follow armed conflict. The killings targeted soldiers about to leave for Afghanistan, while the claim of responsibility sought to cast even the delivery drivers as participants in the military presence. The later identification of Marian Price, her appearance beside a threat against police, and her imprisonment give the group a documented connection to dissident republican activity. They do not, on the evidence presented, amount to a full account of its membership or chain of command.