Northern Ireland may have enjoyed an uneasy peace in recent years, but as illustrated by a massive bank robbery in December, the fear is that paramilitary gangs have simply turned their guns from politics to profit.
According to police and other government agencies, all paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, on both the Catholic and Protestant sides of the sectarian divide, are involved in organised crime.
This can take the form of cigarette smuggling, drugs, extortion and - as in the case of the audacious December 20 raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast - bank robberies.
That crime netted an estimated 26.5 million pounds (38 million euros, 50 million dollars), thought to be the biggest cash haul ever stolen in the British Isles.
Northern Irish police, and the governments on Britain and the Republic of Ireland, have all blamed the largest Catholic paramilitary group, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) for the crime.
The IRA has rejected the allegation, while its political wing, Sinn Fein, which fights elections on both sides of the Irish border, has slammed it as a politically-motivated slur.
According to Assistant Chief Constable Sam Kinkaid of the Northern Ireland Police, who is leading the investigation into the robbery, the IRA are not alone in branching out into traditional crime.
"In Northern Ireland, you do have a number of people in paramilitary groups who are involved in organised crime. All forms of organised crime," he told AFP.
"And that is not just the Provisional IRA. That is all republican (Catholic) and loyalist (Protestant) terrorist groups."
Kinkaid says he is certain that IRA chiefs in Belfast are implicated in robbery. However, as is often case with paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, it is very hard to persuade witnesses to testify.
Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell is openly furious with Sinn Fein, which attracts more than 10 percent of voter support in the Republic of Ireland even, as he sees it, the IRA military arm commits crime.
"They are fascists," he told AFP.
Although the IRA has observed a cease-fire since 1997, a year before the landmark Good Friday peace deal largely ended 30 years of bloodshed and introduced a power-sharing semi-autonomous government, times are tense.
The Northern Ireland Assembly has been suspended amid acrimony for more than two years, and the issue of crime is extremely sensitive given that Protestant leaders will not work with Sinn Fein while the IRA remains active.
In November 2004 the Independent Monitoring Commission, established by London and Dublin to look at the activities of paramilitary groups, reported that the IRA had "continued to recruit, though in small numbers, and to gather intelligence".
The IRA and other organisations were also involved in organised crime, the Commission said.
"Criminal activity by paramilitary groups poses a significant continuing threat which the suspension of politically motivated activity by such groups will not of itself bring to an end," it concluded.
According to Northern Ireland's Organised Crime Task Force, the IRA is "widely involved" in robbery, smuggling, counterfeiting, money laundering and fraud.
The smaller Irish National Liberation Army, or INLA, is known to be involved in drug trafficking and extortion, while other Catholic paramilitary gangs deal in lucrative contraband such as cigarettes and petrol.
Things are similar on the Protestant side, with the Ulster Defence Association making money from drug trafficking and prostitution, among other things, and the Ulster Volunteer Force implicated in robbery and extortion.
"The legacy of terrorism is a significant influence," the Organised Crime Task Force says on its Internet site.
"Our assessment is that the majority of the top level (organised crime) groups known to law enforcement agencies are either associated with or controlled by loyalist or republican paramilitaries."
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