Brian Campbell: Playwright and former IRA prisoner Brian Campbell, who has died in Newry, in many ways typified the Northern republican leadership which has advanced Sinn Féin and relegated the IRA.
Caught and jailed at 26 as a would-be bomber, he was still an activist two decades later in another form. In plays primarily about lives shaped by the Troubles, as in organisational work for Sinn Féin and involvement in the newspaper Daily Ireland established this year, Brian Campbell helped voice the changing line of a collective leadership.
A walker, former hurler and footballer, he collapsed after a run on October 8th and died on the way to hospital. He was acting news editor and a subeditor on Daily Ireland, having helped start the newspaper.
On his release from jail he was made editor of the official republican newspaper, An Phoblacht, from the period of the IRA's broken ceasefire until Sinn Féin's arrival at Stormont. He also worked in his home town of Newry, Co Down, for the Sinn Féin team which aimed successfully in the last general election to replace the long-serving SDLP MP Seamus Mallon with present MP Conor Murphy.
Campbell emerged as a prominent figure in the new republican mould while serving a 15-year sentence in the Maze H Blocks. He was born in Coleraine, but his family moved to Newry when he was a child and he went to university in Liverpool where he met his wife, Gráinne.
He graduated during the 1981 hunger-strike, joined the IRA, was arrested with bomb-making materials with a schoolfriend from Newry and convicted for possession of explosives in 1986. He did an Open University social studies degree in jail.
With Laurence McKeown, a prisoner who later became a hunger-striker, Campbell started An Glór Gafa (The Captive Voice) three years into his sentence to encourage inmates' poems, short stories and essays. The magazine survived until the Maze was run down for closing in 2000. He also edited an account with McKeown by 28 prisoners of the blanket protests and hunger-strikes, published as Nor Meekly Serve My Time.
When freed the two made a feature film about the hunger-strike, as yet unreleased, and had two plays staged by the Belfast company Dubbeljoint: The Laughter of Our Children, also on the hunger strikes, and A Cold House, about a former RUC officer employing a repair man for his central heating system, who turns out to be an ex-IRA member.
Campbell wrote two plays alone for Dubbeljoint and was finishing a third at his death. BBC Radio 4 broadcast his play Tiger Leaping Gorge, and a soap opera written with McKeown, Up the Road, ran for some time on the west Belfast station Féile FM.
He is survived by his wife, Gráinne, and children Niall and Mairéad.
Brian Campbell: born January 4th, 1960; died October 8th, 2005