An IRA splinter group just carried out a brazen attack in Dublin

An Irish Republican dissident group said it was behind a fatal shooting last Friday at an Irish boxing weigh-in, according to the BBC.

One man was killed and two others wounded when gunmen opened fire at the event at the Regency Hotel in Dublin.

In a statement to the BBC, a man claiming to speak on behalf of the leadership of the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) dissident Republican group said its members were responsible.

"We are not going to stand back and allow drug dealers and criminals to target republicans," the BBC quoted the man as saying.

Dissident Republican splinter groups do not recognize the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) ceasefire in Northern Ireland. The splinter groups, which include CIRA and the Real IRA (RIRA), do not consider themselves bound by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The accords ended the conflict between the Northern Ireland's militant Irish nationalist groups and the British government over the status of Northern Ireland, which had killed over 3,600 people during the previous three decades.

The CIRA attack in Dublin is just the latest sign of life from extremist Republican factions. A significant dissident weapons cache was uncovered in Ireland's County Monaghan in December, while two bombs were found near an Army reserve center in Londonderry, Northern Ireland that previous May, according to the BBC.

Meanwhile, even the Sinn Fein, once the political wing of the IRA and one of the signatories of the Good Friday Accord, might still have paramilitary ties of its own: An October 2015 UK government report found that the IRA's "army council" still existed and exerted at least some influence over Sinn Fein, which participates in northern Irish elections and seats representatives in the country's parliament as a result of the Good Friday Agreement.

Still, the anti-peace factions aren't in much of a position to threaten the mainstream republican groups. As Irish political analyst Eamonn McDonagh told Business Insider, the IRA still has the ability to bring extremists to heel.

"The last but most effective line of defense against the dissidents is that the broad mass of the Republican community in Northern Ireland supports Sinn Fein and the IRA, and if their position as top dogs was threatened then the lads in the dissident groups know exactly what would happen to them and that human rights, etc, would not be a consideration," McDonagh wrote Business Insider by email.

In May of 2015, Gerard Davison, a prominent pro-peace ex-IRA commander was killed in Belfast. Three months later, the suspected trigger man, a veteran IRA militant named Kevin McGuigan, was himself murdered, a suspected reprisal killing that was tied to known members of the more mainstream, pro-peace IRA.

In this kind of environment, there's only so much danger that relatively fringe groups like CIRA, which has an estimated membership of 100, can actually pose.

The CIRA killing in Dublin maybe not have had a political motive, though. In Ireland, the line between Republican splinter groups and organized crime is notably thin: according to Forbes, the Real IRA has an annual turnover of $50 million, thanks partly to "smuggling and illegal trade."

It's possible the CIRA shooting was more related to the organization's criminal enterprises than with Irish reunification: According to the Irish newspaper The Journal, the victim of the CIRA shooting was an associate of Dublin's Kinehan crime gang.