BRIAN KEENAN, who has died of cancer aged 66, was one of the leading Irish republicans of his generation. He masterminded a bombing and shooting campaign in Britain that resulted in several civilian murders and is reputed to have been “chief of staff” of the IRA.
In later years, he played an important role in furthering the peace process and persuading erstwhile IRA hardliners to back the strategy developed by Sinn Féin leaders, notably Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
As the IRA’s quartermaster-general, Keenan 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.
Earlier, Keenan travelled the world negotiating arms deals for the IRA, most notably with Libya’s Gaddafi in 1972. According to one informer, Keenan also approved the IRA murder of 10 Protestant workers, known as the Kingsmill massacre, in retaliation for the killing of five Catholics.
But following his release in 1993, Keenan persuaded the IRA high command to embrace the peace process. He was centrally involved in the moves that led to the IRA ceasefires in 1994 and 1997. More recently, he acted as the secret intermediary with John de Chastelain, the Canadian general charged with decommissioning weapons.
Keenan was always a key figure in the background, whose consent had to be secured by Adams and McGuinness, the Sinn Féin negotiators. Tony Blair’s former chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell, who was involved in negotiating the Belfast 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.
He joined the IRA at the end of the 1960s and quickly rose to senior rank. By August 1971 he was quartermaster of the Provisionals’ Belfast brigade. Arrested in 1974, he served a 12-month jail sentence, and afterwards helped reorganise the IRA into a cellular structure.
The bombing campaign and other violence in England orchestrated by Keenan gave him considerable status among republicans. It also brought pain and misery to a large number, opened many Irish in England to retaliatory harassment, and left Keenan himself and a number of others in jail for long stretches.
The Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings in late 1974 killed seven people and led to the wrongful convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguire family. Even republican mythmaking could hardly claim that “taking the war to the heart of Britain” brought British withdrawal any closer.
Keenan was convicted of planning terrorist acts, including six killings, and was sentenced to 21 years in jail, of which he served 14.
Upon release, he was intelligent enough to realise that the “long war” had reached a stalemate. 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 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: born 1941; died May 21st 2008