Judges in Northern Ireland have had to make new security arrangements for themselves and their families at levels not seen since the height of the Provisional IRA campaign.

Police have restored 24-hour security for dozens of judges, some of whom live in isolated rural houses where they moved when the terrorist campaigns ended.

Republicans intent on destroying the peace process are targeting the judiciary, and judges and their spouses have been issued with new security guidance including checking under vehicles for bombs each time they use them.

In some cases judges’ families have altered their routines to disrupt terrorist surveillance and in others judges have been told that they must not leave their homes without security personnel shadowing them.

Times Archive, 1983: Catholic judge killed by IRA

Two provisional IRA gunmen assassinated a Northern Ireland county court judge yesterday

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The threat level faced by the judiciary was raised two weeks ago after a judge in the northwest of the province was alerted to having been tracked to a restaurant with his wife by two known republican terrorists. The judge and his wife escaped from the restaurant in Limavady, Co Londonderry, before the police arrived, by which time the terrorists had fled.

The incident coincided with intelligence from a “credible source” that pointed to the judiciary as a renewed object of interest for republican terrorists. The Real IRA and Continuity IRA, both splinter groups of the Provisionals, want to demonstrate that they consider the transfer of policing and judiciary powers from Westminster to Stormont of no significance.

Sinn Féin wants the powers to be transferred immediately, arguing that it would demonstrate that Northern Ireland is not ruled from London and that a process of disengagement from Britain is gathering pace.

The Democratic Unionists, however, are stalling on the transfer of the powers — to the annoyance of Gordon Brown — because they say that there is insufficient public confidence.

The increased security threat has exposed friction between judges and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The Times has seen a memo in which a senior member of the judiciary wrote to his colleagues in angry terms about the threat.

The judge discussed emergency arrangements for court cover in light of the heightened terror threat before launching into a tirade against the police, insisting that “it will be made clear that the obligation is on them to identify and provide the proper level of security, not for us to ask”.

The judge added: “That threat is on a step-upwards trajectory and so we all have to be very careful.”

Last month the partner of a police dog-handler escaped serious injury when a bomb partially detonated under her sports car in East Belfast. The woman usually drove her partner to work and the bomb had been placed under the passenger side of the vehicle.

There have been 11 murder attempts on police officers since PC Stephen Carroll was shot dead in March, two days after two soldiers were killed as they collected a pizza at the main gate of Massereene Barracks in Antrim.

In the past two years there have been more than 750 bomb alerts, 420 of them involving viable devices. Thirty-eight police officers and their families have moved home in the past two years because of death threats and 50 others have been given extra security. Terrorist incidents are now running at an average of nearly one a day and security sources say that it is more a matter of luck that nobody has been killed since March.

During its terrorist campaign the Provisional IRA murdered five members of the judiciary, a judge’s wife and a judge’s daughter. Loyalist terrorists murdered two solicitors.

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