5. What sorts of attacks have they committed?
• The July 1972 bombing spree known as Bloody Friday, in which downtown Belfast was rocked by twenty-two bombs in seventy-five minutes, leaving nine dead and 130 injured;
• The 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten, Queen Elizabeth II's uncle and the last Viceroy of India;
• The 1984 bombing of a Brighton hotel where then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were meeting, which wounded several British officials and killed four other Britons;
• A 1993 car bombing in London's financial district, Canary Wharf, that killed one person and caused $1 billion of damage;
• Mortar attacks on the British prime minister's residence and London's Heathrow Airport in the early 1990s;
• Bombings of civilian targets, including pubs, shops, and subway stations, in Northern Ireland and Britain throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
• Involvement in organized criminal activities, such as extortion, bank robbery, smuggling, and counterfeiting.
6. What is being done to eliminate this terrorist group?
The Good Friday Agreement

The IRA ceasefire in 1997 formed part of a process that led to the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement between Ireland and British Governments. One aim of the Agreement is that all paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland cease their activities and disarm by May 2000.
Calls from Sinn Féin, a political party in Ireland, led the IRA to commence disarming in a process that was monitored by Canadian General John de Chastelain's decommissioning body in October 2001. However, following the collapse of the Stormont power-sharing government in 2002, which was partly triggered by allegations that republican spies were operating within Parliament Buildings and the Civil Service, the IRA temporarily broke off contact with General de Chastelain.
In December 2004, attempts to persuade the IRA to disarm entirely collapsed when the Democratic Unionist Party, under Ian Paisley, insisted on photographic evidence. Justice Minister Michael McDowell (in public, and often) insisted that there would need to be a complete end to IRA activity.
At the beginning of February 2005, the IRA declared that it was withdrawing from the disarmament process, but in July 2005 it declared that its campaign of violence was over, and that transparent mechanisms would be used, under the de Chastelain process, to satisfy the Northern Ireland communities that it was disarming totally.
On 28 July 2005, the IRA Army Council announced an end to its armed campaign, stating that it would work to achieve its aims using "purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means",[22] and shortly afterwards completed decommissioning. In September 2008, the nineteenth report of the Independent Monitoring Commission stated that the IRA was "committed to the political path" and no longer represented "a threat to peace or to democratic politics", and that the IRA's Army Council was "no longer operational or functional".