A French court on Monday sentenced two Irishmen and a Frenchman, all with suspected links to the Irish republican splinter group the Real IRA, in connection with the discovery of arms in France in 2003, according to Reuters. All three were charged with "criminal association with a terrorist group". Irishman Gary Roche was arrested in Portugal last year before being turned over to France. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison and is forbidden from ever returning to French territory. Another Irishman, Kieron Doran, received the same sentence after being tried in absentia. An international arrest warrant has been issued for him. French sympathiser Bernard le Gac, who was arrested in November 2003 during a police operation in Brittany in western France, received a suspended two-year sentence. Police discovered the stash of two machine guns, an automatic pistol and two silencers buried in a forest near the town of Dieppe in northern France in November 2003. The Real IRA is a breakaway from the Irish Republican Army, a guerrilla group which fought a three-decade campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland during which 3,600 people died. The Real IRA was responsible for the single deadliest attack of the conflict when it detonated a bomb in the Northern Irish market town of Omagh in 1998, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds of others just months after a peace deal was signed. Since then, the bombings and shootings that marked 30 years of sectarian conflict in the British province have largely come to a halt -- a shift underlined last year when the main IRA movement pledged to end violence for good. Northern Ireland's ceasefire watchdog has said it believes the IRA is keeping to that promise but issued a report in October saying it considers the much smaller Real IRA to be still active and dangerous.
