RIP Brian Keenan - Irish Patriot

Senior IRA commander Brian Keenan has died after a battle with cancer, Sinn Fein said today.

The West Belfast-based republican was a key figure in the organisation during the peace process.

A Sinn Fein spokesman confirmed his death.

Born in 1942 in county Londonderry, the son of a member of the Royal Air Force, Keenan grew up in a family with no republic leanings, and moved to England in his teens, where he worked as a television repair man.

He returned to Ulster when the Troubles began and joined the IRA in around 1970. By the following year he was the quartermaster of the Belfast brigade, and involved in masterminding Belfast bombings.

In 1973 he took control of the IRA's bombing campaign in England and became IRA Quartermaster General. He was regarded as the right-hand man of Gerry Adams, then imprisoned in Long Kesh and attempting to influence the direction and structure of the IRA from his prison cell.

Keenan served a 12-month prison sentence in the Irish republic in 1974, and came to the attention of the English police in 1975 when his fingerprints were identified at the hideout of the Balcombe Street Siege gang.

The warrant issued for his arrest in 1975 led to his extradition to England when he was arrested in Ireland in 1979, in his pocket an address book listing his contacts. He stood trial in June 1980 for masterminding the IRA's bombing campaign in England and was jailed for 18 years.

After his release in 1993 he rose to become one of the seven members of the IRA's ruling Army Council. For a time he split from his old mentor Mr Adams after the IRA's first ceasefire in 1994, wanting to continue the armed struggle.

He was on the Army Council that authorised the 1996 Docklands bombing that killed two people and ended the IRA ceasefire.

As the peace process got under way in the late 1990s, however, he swung his authority behind the twin track strategy of talking peace while threatening to return to bloodshed if demands were not met, dubbed the Armalite and the ballot box.
Both politics and violence were "legitimate forms of revolution", he told IRA waverers in 2001, and both "have to be prosecuted to the utmost".

"The revolution can never be over until we have British imperialism where it belongs - in the dustbin of history," he said, in a message aimed at keeping up the IRA's resolve and preventing activists from defecting to the dissident Real IRA.

Keenan acted as the IRA's go-between with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, eventually playing such a key role in negotiations that Mr Adams remarked: "There wouldn't be a peace process if it wasn't for Brian Keenan."

He resigned from the Army Council in 2005 due to ill health.