Last week on the Irish border, gardaí intercepted a car carrying a viable explosive device containing military-grade explosives, a detonator and a timing unit. The driver, 25-year-old law student Isobella Perrie Sullivan from County Kildare, was charged with possession of explosives. 

A second man, 44-year-old Simon O’Donovan, a facilities manager at the National Museum of Ireland’s Collins Barracks in Dublin, was later charged with the same offence. The court heard that he is alleged to have stored the device at the museum itself. Sullivan’s lawyers have said that she was asked to take a bag to Northern Ireland and had not been aware of what was in it. O’Donovan has not yet obtained formal legal representation.

The middle-class young seek transcendence in a mass movement that demands total commitment

The middle-class young seek transcendence in a mass movement that demands total commitment

This recent case has again potentially highlighted a pattern that is becoming harder to ignore: the recruitment of young, middle-class, educated people – women as readily as men – into networks that can shade into support for political violence. Neither of those charged fits the old stereotype of the hardened street radical. One is a university-educated law student studying for the Bar; the other holds a steady public sector cultural job.

The........

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