THE IRA may be planning a “retirement fund” for its volunteers using the proceeds of Britain’s biggest ever bank robbery, security sources believe.

Detectives in Northern Ireland suspect that the terrorist group, which has been linked by communication intercepts to last week’s daring raid in Central Belfast, intends to use at least part of the money as a “pension fund” for its activists.

Reports have so far put the amount seized from the Northern Bank at £22 million, but sources said yesterday that the true figure may be as high as £40 million.

Were this amount to be shared between the several thousand serving and former IRA members, they could be in line for up to tens of thousands of pounds each.

This would be the possible “price” for the terrorist group finally agreeing to disappear in return for Sinn Fein joining a power-sharing administration with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

As the police investigation focused on a handful of key IRA figures in Belfast, officers yesterday ended forensic examinations of the homes of two Northern Bank employees kept hostages by the robbers.

The homes of Chris Ward, 23, in the Poleglass estate in nationalist West Belfast, and Kevin McMullan, in Loughinisland, Co Down, had been preserved as crime scenes since news of the break-in started to emerge last Monday.

Mr Ward is reportedly a member of Erin go Brath, a Belfast Celtic supporters’ club, and a regular drinker at the Prisoners’ Dependents Club, a West Belfast social club, which is frequented by former prisoners.

The homes of several prominent republicans have been searched by police, including that of John Trainor, a former republican prisoner said to be the intelligence officer for the IRA’s “Belfast Brigade”, and Eddie Copeland, who has been named in the Commons as the IRA godfather in North Belfast.

The IRA has denied any involvement in the robbery, which has threatened to scupper any hope of a deal between Sinn Fein, its political wing, and the DUP. One security official said: “If, as it now appears likely, this money has been taken by the IRA, then their rank and file are going to want a piece of this.

“The longer the ceasefire goes on and there is relative inactivity, the harder it is for them [the IRA] to hold the whole organisation together.”

He added: “A lot of them will be looking at the lavish holiday homes the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have in the Irish Republic, and asking how the leadership can afford to have these homes and not the rank and file.”

He said that the biggest problem facing the terrorist group was how to launder such vast amounts of money without being caught, but it is believed that this might be achieved by washing the funds through republican bars and clubs and making untrace- able cash payments to IRA members.

Another security source said that the IRA “just couldn’t help themselves”.

“It’s not like they’re short of cash, given all the smuggling they do these days. I would say that they did it because they got the intelligence and they just couldn’t help themselves,” he said.

He said that the money could also be ploughed into Sinn Fein’s campaign funds, the procurement and development of new IRA weapons and the group’s running costs.

In Belfast alone the cost of running the IRA — including the payment of volunteers, communications, cars and safe houses — is estimated at £1 million per year.

As well as dealing a potential blow to the peace process, the robbery is seen as a severe embarrassment to the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland.

“With something as big as this you would have expected in the past to have got a sniff that something was going on,” said one source. “This was an intelligence failure. There wasn’t a single word that this was happening.”

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