"Much has been written and said about the Provisional's decision (to call a ceasefire). Analysing the political reasons that lay behind it, the discussions tend to leave out a vital factor that influenced PIRA in arriving at that position -the success of the RUC in thwarting its operations. (...) It must not be forgotten,..., that before the 1994 cessation, it was becoming increasingly hard for PIRA to pull off the big jobs, the spectaculars, not only in London but also in Belfast -the city that they always regarded as the key to maintaining their campaign. (...) Throughout 1993 and 1994 PIRA was being outgunned in Belfast by the UDA and UVF, who were claiming more victims. It killed 6 people in the city in 1994, before the ceasfire compared to 16 murdered by loyalists. 'We were being slaugthered' commented one veteran Provisional from North Belfast, referring to the mounting fatalities among Catholics. In 1993, there were 13 deaths at the hands of Belfast PIRA, but 10 of those occured because of the premature explosion in the chip shop on the Shankill Road. The organisation's ability to strike at 'prestigious' targets, such as on-duty members of the security forces, was declining rapidly. Of the 6 people it killed in the city in 1994, only one fitted that category...The year before, aside from those killed on the Shankill Road, the Belfast Brigade had managed to kill one off-duty member of the Royal Irish Regiment and two Protestant civilians. The last time a member of the British Army had been killed on duty in Belfast was August 1992. Before that it had been three years since the Provisionals had been able to kill a British soldier on patrol. The PIRA bombing campaign in Belfast, which had shown new vitality in 1991 and 1992, was in decline by 1993. The last major bomb blast to shake the Northern Ireland capital was in May of that year. During the 16 months that elapsed before the ceasefire, there were no more successful PIRA 'commercial' bombings. By the year of the ceasefire there was only sporadic PIRA activity in Derry, and in East Tyrone and North Armagh, once among the most active and dangerous PIRA areas, it has been almost wiped out. Between 1986 and 1992 the East Tyrone and North Armagh brigades had had 22 members killed...South Armagh remained active, but even there PIRA's chief tactic was restricted one-shot long-range sniper attacks...The organisation still retained the capacity to explode the occasional blockbuster in Britain -thanks mainly to the fact that of the two areas from where these attacks emanated, South Armagh and the Irish Republic, one was resistant to RUC penetration and the other was outside the force's juridiction. The decision to call a halt to the campaign in August 1994, was undoubtedly taken partly in response to these operational problems."
(Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, London: Hodder&Stoughton, 1996, pp.265-269)
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