Road to the Olympics: IRA dissidents could crash Olympics party BELFAST, Northern Ireland - When the flame of peace comes to Northern Ireland this summer, police will face an Olympic task to ensure that IRA die-hards don't try to blow it out. The Olympic Torch will spend five June days traveling through 67 cities, towns and villages throughout this long-divided corner of the United Kingdom. The flame's ambitious course into predominantly British Protestant and Irish Catholic turf should offer a poignant measure of how far Northern Ireland has traveled down its own road to reconciliation. Complete Coverage: London 2012 Summer Olympics Pictures: Olympic venues Irish Republican Army dissidents are committed to shattering that image and, experts agree, are bound to see the Olympics as an unprecedented opportunity to advertise their defiant existence. I'd be very surprised if the dissidents don't try something during the Olympics. Putting a small bomb anywhere near an Olympic venue would put them on every front page in the world," said Richard English, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. English said leaders of today's three main IRA splinter groups are desperate to be taken seriously in an age when Northern Ireland peacemaking is seen worldwide as a triumph following the 2005 demise of the long-dominant IRA faction, the Provisionals. He said the Olympic torch will present the first, easiest target. Anything in Ireland is easier for the dissidents to hit. And the torch is a target that just carries on and on and on, its course choreographed far in advance. So it's a nightmare logistically for the police," he said. A security think tank offering advice to British companies for the Olympics, the SIRS Consultancy, says the Olympic flame's June 3-7 procession through Northern Ireland has been recklessly timed. The Northern Ireland leg will coincide with celebrations marking the Diamond Jubilee, the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's ascent to the throne. The U.K. has made that weekend a four-day holiday capped by the queen's June 4 birthday. Northern Ireland police expect heightened tensions between the Protestant majority, which will celebrate the jubilee, and the Catholic minority, which won't. SIRS noted that the flame will spend parts of two days in Londonderry, a focal point for recent dissident attacks, and visit several Irish republican districts from Belfast to the border town of Newry. It also will travel through Omagh, scene of the Real IRA's 1998 car-bomb slaughter, which killed 29 people, mostly women and children. "Whilst it is of course essential to involve Northern Ireland in the U.K.'s Olympic Games," SIRS said in a statement, "routing the torch procession though the most insecure areas of the country during the queen's Diamond Jubilee presents a needless security risk." IRA experts say disrupting the torch's Irish travels could well be an opening act. They say police must be braced for the dissidents to attempt to plant at least one bomb in England, where no IRA faction has exploded a device since before the 9/11 attacks, at some point during the July 27-Aug. 12 London Olympics, chiefly because tens of thousands of foreign journalists will be there.