The booby-trap bomb in Co Fermanagh, near the Cavan border, led the PSNI to say dissident groups were showing an “increased capability”, which it describing as “extremely worrying”.

Though nobody has claimed the weekend bomb attack on the North’s police, it has all the hallmarks of republicans, says Dieter Reinisch.

The shooting dead of Lyra McKee by the New IRA will not affect their actions “in any way”, a leading historian and republican researcher has said.

The so-called New IRA which admitted killing journalist and activist Lyra McKee during a night of riots in Derry’s Creggan estate may have announced its formation in July 2012, but its origins stretch back five years earlier, writes Dieter Reinisch