A delivery vehicle exploded outside a police station in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, on Saturday. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack (which did not injure anyone), but it resembles a bombing in March claimed by the New Irish Republican Army.

• Groups like the New ira emerged out of the original Irish Republican Army terrorist group, which accepted a peace deal in 1997 and shifted its energies as a political party, Sinn Féin. These groups have conducted dozens of sporadic attacks over the past three decades.

The dispute between Catholic Irish Republicans and Protestant Britons in Northern Ireland has been mostly quiet for 28 years. But deep divisions remain.

• For most of Northern Ireland’s history as a political entity, Protestants were the majority. Today, Catholics slightly outnumber them. This demographic shift has strengthened the possibility of Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and joining the Republic of Ireland.
• Sinn Féin is one of the largest parties in the Republic of Ireland and is the largest party in the devolved government of Northern Ireland. Northern Irish First Minister Michelle O’Neill is a member, and she represents the first time Sinn Féin has led a government. She said, “Those behind last night’s attack in Dunmurry speak for absolutely no one. They have no vision, no support, and have nothing to offer our society. Our communities deserve peace.”
• The Northern Ireland conflict, known as The Troubles, was mainly between terrorists from the ira and Protestant groups, with the British government caught in the middle. It lasted from 1968–1998.

As Herbert W. Armstrong proved in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, the British people descended from the patriarch Joseph. That ancestry is the key to why Britain received such enormous power historically and why it is rapidly losing what power it has left. (The entirety of Ireland was once British territory.)

Mr. Armstrong showed that the prophecies of the Bible directly apply to Britain, and that its disobedience to His law would be punished specifically through intervention from a Catholic-dominated European power developing from the European Union, to which the Republic of Ireland belongs. Increased tensions among Catholics in Northern Ireland, as we wrote in 2024, could contribute to this.