LONDON — Three Irish Republican Army dissidents received 30-year prison sentences Tuesday after being convicted of trying to smuggle weapons from Slovakia to mount attacks in England.
The trio — Fintan O'Farrell, 39, Declan Rafferty, 42, and Michael McDonald, 44, all from the Irish border county of Louth — had pleaded guilty last week to charges of trying to obtain illegal weapons and conspiring to cause explosions in England.
They had been caught red-handed in an undercover sting run by MI5, the British secret service. In earlier court testimony, agents recounted how they had posed as Iraqi agents and met the IRA dissidents several times in Slovakia, tape recording their conversations, before authorizing their arrest by Slovak police last July.
At the time of their arrest, prosecutors said, the men had been negotiating prices with the agents for a wide-ranging arsenal, ranging from detonators and explosives to wire-guided rockets and sniping rifles.
The men's lawyers argued for clemency, arguing that their clients were among the first Irish republicans in British legal history to offer guilty pleas.
But sentencing the men, Justice Michael Astill said they had been "at or near the heart" of a dissident group nicknamed the Real IRA, which opposes both the 1997 cease-fire being observed by most IRA members and the 1998 peace accord for Northern Ireland. The Real IRA was responsible for the deadliest single attack in 32 years of conflict in the British territory, a 1998 car bomb in the town of Omagh that left 29 dead and more than 330 wounded.
"Whatever justification you can find in your hearts and minds for the killing and maiming, it's the duty of these courts to reflect the public revulsion for the suffering and grief you impose on the innocent," Astill said.
"All of you were trusted by the Real IRA to carry out a mission that was crucial to the Real IRA's future terrorist activities," the judge said.
Astill dismissed the significance of their guilty pleas, arguing, "The reality was that the evidence against you was so compelling that you had no choice."
The men waved to relatives and friends in the visitor's gallery at Woolwich Crown Court, east of London, as police led them away in handcuffs.
Police discoveries of Real IRA arms dumps in the Republic of Ireland indicate that the dissidents have already made successful purchases of new weaponry, largely Russian in design, from arms suppliers in the former Yugoslavia. Among the weapons seized are modern "mark 18" rocket-propelled grenade launchers.