Police commander Matt Baggott and the leaders of Northern Ireland's unity government, standing side by side at government headquarters in Belfast, vowed that Saturday's killing of Constable Ronan Kerr would not deter Catholics from joining the police.
Kerr, 25, was killed by a booby-trap bomb hidden under his car. He had graduated from Northern Ireland's police academy in December and was the first member of the security forces to be killed in two years.
The attack underscored the particular danger that officers living in Irish Catholic districts face. The dissidents want to deter their side of the community from enforcing law and order in the British territory of Northern Ireland.
But Saturday's killing has inspired unprecedented condemnation of the dissidents among Catholic leaders and community groups, most influentially the Gaelic Athletic Association, a sports organisation providing the social bedrock for many Irish-nationalist villages and towns. The GAA barred police officers from joining its sports clubs until 2001 - but now is calling for Catholics to support and join the police.
"The people who murdered Ronan Kerr need to consider how isolated they are. And they need to bring their activities to an immediate end. They are involved in a useless war against peace," said Martin McGuinness, deputy leader of the government and a former IRA commander. "They are enemies of the peace. They are the enemies of the people of Ireland."
His Protestant colleague, First Minister Peter Robinson, described the dissidents as idiotic for thinking that violence could tear apart their 4-year-old partnership government. He noted that the once-overwhelmingly Protestant police force has topped 30 percent Catholic this year, despite the risk of assassination.
"We have spent a long time getting to the new era that we have entered. We are not going back," Robinson said.
Police forensics specialists spent a second day yesterday poring over the scene of the blast outside Kerr's home in a middle-class Catholic part of Omagh - a town synonymous with the deadliest bombing of the entire Northern Ireland conflict.
In August 1998, dissidents detonated a car bomb amid a crowd of shoppers, workers and tourists fleeing a bomb alert and killed 29 people, mostly women and children. No IRA dissident was ever successfully prosecuted for that attack.
The officer leading the Kerr murder investigation, Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray, said the bomb was attached to the bottom exterior of the car, under the driver's seat. He said it was housed in a gray lunchbox-style container and contained less than 500 grams of unspecified high explosive.
He said officers had already reconstructed enough fragments from the bomb to determine it contained a timing device. He stressed that this device was built to protect the bomb-planter from premature detonation, not to trigger it.
IRA weapons engineers first designed these booby-trapped bombs in the mid-1980s with the intention of maiming or killing officers and soldiers when they take the wheel of their private cars. They commonly used devices called mercury-tilt switches that triggered the bomb when the car drove up or down a slope.
However, Saturday's bomb detonated immediately when Kerr entered his car.
Murray said solving the case and catching the bomber or bombers would require the victim's mostly Catholic neighbours to tell police every detail of every visiting person and vehicle in the area from Thursday afternoon - when the attackers might have scouted the target - and Saturday when Kerr was killed as he prepared to drive to work.
"What vehicles were in that area? Who was visiting residents? Did residents get deliveries? Were there taxis (or) fast food deliveries? We need a minute-by-minute picture of what happened," Murray said. "The answer to the question 'Who planted that bomb and can we catch them?' lies within that detail."
Northern Ireland police officers are taught always to look under their personal cars before driving. But officers concede they don't do this as rigorously as in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the IRA was killing and crippling officers several times a year using the devices.
Most of the dissidents' booby-trap bombs have failed to explode. A few of the duds even fell off the targeted car on to the roadway. But two that did detonate fully in May 2008 and January 2010 blew off the legs of two officers; both men survived.
Murray declined to say whether Saturday's bomb was suspected of containing Semtex, the IRA's most powerful and long-lasting plastic explosive.
Libya supplied several tonnes of Semtex to the IRA in the mid-1980s. Dissidents seized some of that stockpile before most IRA members disarmed and renounced violence in 2005.
