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IRA Guns: The List of Weapons

BBC News

26 September 2005

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Despite all of the speculation over the years, only the IRA knows the true extent of its arsenal.

However, General John de Chastelain, head of the international body charged with decommissioning paramilitary arms in Northern Ireland, says that the IRA has now put its weapons beyond use.

While Gen de Chastelain says he will not reveal the exact nature of what he has seen rendered either unusable or unobtainable, in his briefing he gave some details of the decommissioning process - and suggested strongly that assessments published by Jane's Intelligence Review, themselves drawn from security estimates, were accurate…

ESTIMATES OF WEAPONRY

The bulk of the IRA's weaponry was Libyan supplied. It included machine guns, rifles, handguns, ammunition, Semtex plastic explosives, surface-to-air missiles and rocket launchers. However, not all of its was useful to the kind of conflict that the IRA wanted to fight, according to experts at Jane's.

IRA WEAPONRY
1,000 rifles
2 tonnes of Semtex
20-30 heavy machine guns
7 Surface-to-air missiles (unused)
7 flame throwers
1,200 detonators
11 rocket-propelled grenade launchers
90 hand guns
100+ grenades

Source: Security estimates/Jane's Intelligence Review

ID: N297

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