Ex-republican leader who never wavered in protesting innocence

MARIE O'HALLORAN

THE FORMER Workers’ Party president has always protested his innocence and his lawyers said the allegations had been in the public domain for years.

The 77-year-old Dubliner was a republican leader of the 1960s and 1970s. Mr Garland joined the IRA in 1953, aged 19, and was involved in the 1950s Border campaign, also spending time as a training officer.

He was imprisoned in 1957 in Mountjoy and in November that year, while still in prison, stood in the Dublin North Central byelection for Sinn Féin. He was then interned in the Curragh, but released in 1959. Mr Garland was subsequently jailed for four years in Crumlin Road prison in Belfast.

After the IRA split in 1969 he joined the official wing, becoming a prominent figure in Official Sinn Féin who supported the move to end abstentionism and helped deliver an Official IRA ceasefire in 1972.

In 1975 he was injured in an INLA attack but was later a key mover in changing the party’s name to Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party and finally the Workers’ Party. He became general secretary of each and later treasurer.

But in a bitter split in the party he sided with the late Tomás MacGiolla against Proinsias De Rossa, who left with a substantial majority of the membership to form Democratic Left in 1982.

During his career with the Workers’ Party he travelled to North Korea and Moscow on a number of occasions and unsuccessfully sought funding from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He became party president in 2000 and campaigned against the Nice treaty in the EU and was active on issues such as opposition to the Iraq war.

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