SAOIRSE32

Newshound

(by Liam Clarke, News Letter)

I can remember the ripple ran that round the press gallery at the opening of the Northern Ireland Assembly just over a year ago when Brian Keenan was spotted sitting in the honoured guests section along with other IRA leaders.

“Is that Keenan? Is that Storey beside him?” colleagues hissed. It seemed remarkable at the time, for in the past these men would normally have been stopped by security like Michael Stone; afterwards, the Assembly authorities insisted that a full guest list wasn’t available.

Once the initial frisson of excitement and scramble to put names to faces, had died down their presence was reassuring. The sight of Keenan craning forward like a tourist for a better look at Ian Paisley was a sign that the deal would indeed stick.

Jonathan Powell, who was sitting just feet away from Keenan, later described him as the most dangerous threat to the British state during the IRA bombing campaign in London in the 1970s but added “he was also instrumental in bringing the IRA round to a political strategy”.

Keenan’s long illness began in July 2002, when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer after complaining of what he thought was a bowel infection. “If he had died it might not have been possible to persuade the IRA to trade the armalite for the ballot box” Powell said.

He was the intermediary with General John de Chastelain’s decommissioning body. They gave him the code name “O’Neill”, in reference to the P. O’Neill signature which appears at the end of the IRA statements.

Keenan was an intelligent man who spoke French, Arabic and Spanish. He was an avowed Marxist who held East Germany out as an example of what a united Ireland would be like. It was Keenan who, through his international contacts, forged links with Libya and later with the FARC terrorists in Colombia in an attempt to arm the IRA for the long haul.

He organised the 1970s IRA bombing campaign which culminated in the Balcombe Street Siege where his finger prints were found on documents. During a brief ceasefire in 1976 he backed hardline units to carry out sectarian atrocities in South Armagh, including the Kingsmills massacre.

In 1979 he was finally arrested after meeting Martin McGuinness, who was under surveillance, on the way to scout a bombing. During his 18 year sentence Keenan speculated to other prisoners that McGuinness may have betrayed him, but he dropped the matter after his released. Still, he must have had mixed emotions as he watched the Deputy First Minister from the Stormont gallery.

Keenan left no statesmanlike or visionary speeches – they are all filled with threats and hatred. This made him the ideal man to put an uncompromising face on what would otherwise have looked like defeat.

George Bush may wish to look at this example when he visits Northern Ireland next month to encourage investment and take his share of the credit for the success of the peace process.

All this is to be welcomed. The ending of the troubles had many causes, but American “soft power” – the use of diplomatic and economic influence – helped to chop years off the conflict. There is no underestimating the success of the security forces in closing down the options of men like Keenan, but diplomatic pressure and patient persuasion finally talked them down from the ledge and made them persuaders for a deal they had wasted their youths rejecting.

Yet Bush and John McCain, the Republican candidate for the presidency, have described proposals from Barack Obama for talks with Cuba, Iran and Hamas as comparable to the attempted appeasement of Hitler prior to the Second World War.

The analogy breaks down because the appeasement of Hitler was a cave in to military pressure from a dictator who was attempting to overrun large sections of Europe. Cuba, Iran and even Hamas are not in this league. The US is the most powerful country on earth. These countries have no missiles that could reach its shores but it could, if it was prepared for the price, bomb any of them into submission. They know this, just as Keenan knew, after a lifetime’s bitter experience, that the security forces had the upper hand.

This is a good time for the US to talk quietly and carry a big stick. The other approach has, as Obama put it, “left the country with two wars and a battered economy”.

May 22, 2008
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This article appeared in the May 22, 2008 edition of the News Letter.

Leading IRA strategist whose conversion from violence aided the peace process

Deaglán de Bréadún
The Guardian
Thursday May 22 2008

Brian Keenan, who has died of cancer aged 66, was one of the leading Irish republicans of his generation, a fiercely committed guerrilla strategist, and a formidable foe of the British state. As the IRA’s quartermaster-general, he was the principal organiser of the bombing campaign that rocked London in the mid-1970s, and was jailed for 18 years in 1980 for his involvement in the deaths of eight people, including Ross McWhirter, who was shot dead at close range, and the oncologist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, one of several people blown up by car bombs.

Earlier, Keenan had travelled the world establishing contacts in East Germany, Lebanon and Syria, and negotiating arms deals for the IRA, most notably with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi in 1972.

But following his release on parole in 1993, Keenan used his influence to persuade the IRA high command to embrace the peace process. In 1994, he was centrally involved in the moves that led to the first IRA ceasefire, its breakdown in February 1996 and subsequent resumption in July 1997. More recently, he acted as the secret intermediary with John de Chastelain, the Canadian general charged with decommissioning IRA and loyalist weapon stocks in Ireland.

Throughout the peace process, Keenan was always a key figure in the background, whose consent had to be secured by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the republican negotiators. Their high regard for him was shared by the British security authorities, who had a healthy respect for Keenan’s abilities as a paramilitary strategist. In his recent book, Great Hatred, Little Room (2008), Tony Blair’s former chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell, who was involved in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement, wrote: “If [Keenan] had been against it, [decommissioning] would not have happened.”

The son of an RAF airman who served in the second world war, Keenan was born in Belfast, though his family was evacuated after a Luftwaffe bomb landed on their house. They moved to Swatragh, County Derry. As a teenager, he worked as a television repairman in Corby, Northamptonshire, before returning to Northern Ireland in the mid-1960s just as the civil rights movement began. He got a job in an electronics factory in Belfast, and gained a reputatin as a militant trade unionist.

He joined the IRA at the end of the 1960s and quickly rose to senior rank. By August 1971, at the time of internment, he was quartermaster of the Provisionals’ Belfast brigade. Arrested in the Irish Republic in 1974, he served a 12-month jail sentence, and afterwards became what one senior republican called “a roving ambassador” for the reorganisation of the IRA into a cellular structure being planned by, among others, Adams in the Long Kesh internment camp outside Belfast.

Keenan’s principal responsibility during the London bombing campaign was directing and supplying the IRA unit that was cornered in the Balcombe Street siege of December 1975 after 18 months of bombing and shooting targets across the capital. His fingerprints were found on a crossword puzzle at one of the gang’s hideouts and he was eventually arrested near Banbridge, in Northern Ireland, in 1979. He continued to support Adams while in prison, and at one point the IRA hatched a plan to break him out of jail using a helicopter.

Frequently labelled a Marxist, Keenan never expounded his political philosophy in any depth in public, but he saw himself as a disciple of the Irish socialist James Connolly. His pragmatism was typical of a wide array of militant republicans who gave their backing to the political approach mapped out by Adams and the other Sinn Féin leaders to avoid a catastrophic split that could have led to the emergence of an Irish Hamas. In the latter stages of his paramilitary career, Keenan decided that the best chance for progress towards his ultimate goal of a socialist united Ireland lay in taking the political path and supporting the peace process.

He was intelligent enough to realise that the “long war” had reached a stalemate where neither side could destroy the other but where a united Ireland was never going to be achieved by the traditional militarist formula for driving the British Army into the sea. Likewise, he was sufficiently political to realise that, in the longer term, there could be movement towards the dream of unity and that, in the meantime, the lot of the republican and nationalist community could be improved by participation in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

In May last year, Keenan, already a sick man, sat in the gallery at Stormont watching his old foe Ian Paisley being sworn in as first minister of the Northern Ireland assembly. Afterwards, Gerry Adams observed: “There wouldn’t be a peace process if it wasn’t for Brian Keenan.” He is survived by his wife, Chrissie, and six children.

· Brian Keenan, Irish republican, born 1941; died May 21 2008

By Claire Simpson

**Via Newshound
21/05/08

A SPLIT within unionist-dominated Ballymena Borough Council could lead to the election of the town’s first nationalist mayor next month.

SDLP councillor PJ McAvoy, who is deputy mayor, has been tipped to succeed the DUP’s Maurice Mills at a mayoral election on June 2.

He has already been backed by councillor Robin Stirling, one of six DUP councillors who quit the party last year in protest at its decision to share power with Sinn Fein.

The six formed their own party, the Ulster Unionist Coalition (UUC), which is the second biggest in the council.

Mr McAvoy was elected deputy mayor last year after the DUP was forced to strike a deal with the SDLP.

However, he said it was too early to speculate on whether he would become first citizen.

“People are just starting to think about it,” he said.

He said there was no precedent for the deputy to automatically succeed the mayor.

“We have to go through an election,” he said.

“There was a Catholic mayor of Ballymena in the 1950s or late 1940s. That was at a time when councils were run by businessmen.

“So if I became mayor I suppose I could be described as the first nationalist party mayor to be elected.”

BBC

All paramilitaries must get rid of their weapons, Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward has again said.

He said they should do so sooner rather than later, as the legal mechanism for doing so will not last indefinitely.

At the moment the Independent International Body on Decommissioning oversees the process.

However, Mr Woodward said Northern Ireland could only be a normal society when such a body no longer existed.

He said the commissioners could not be in Northern Ireland forever - they should go sooner rather than later.

Mr Woodward also said the assembly should set a date for the devolution of policing and justice.

He was speaking at Queen’s University in Belfast where former premiers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have been given honorary doctorates.

Mr Woodward was speaking at Queen’s University in Belfast where former premiers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have been given honorary doctorates.

Derry Journal
22 May 2008

Hardline republicans in Derry have denied any knowledge of an alleged threat to a Protestant man who claims he had been forced out of his home.

The man, who is originally from Belfast, claimed he had to leave his home after being warned of a threat to his life.

He said police visited him to tell him about an alleged threat against him from dissident republicans. The man also said he believed he was being targeted because he is a Protestant living in a republican area.
However, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement - the group believed to be linked to the Real IRA - have denied the alleged threat came from republicans.

A spokesperson for the group in Derry said: “So far as the 32CSM is concerned, we categorically deny any involvement with such a threat. To our knowledge no such threat was given by anyone. The alleged threat was passed on to this man by the RUC/PSNI operating to a Mi5 agenda.The Protestant community have nothing to fear from republicans in Derry City or, indeed, anywhere on this island,” he said.

A spokesperson for the PSNI said: “We do not comment on the personal security of individuals. However, if we feel that someone needs to review their personal security, we take steps to inform them immediately. We never ignore anything that could put someone at risk.”