Convicted sex offender Vincent McKenna was released from prison early this morning.
McKenna (40), who was previously a prominent human rights campaigner in the North, left Wheatfield Prison in Dublin at 6am after reaching the end of a six-year sentence for sexually abusing his daughter.
The Prison Service said it had taken the decision to release him early in the morning for security reasons after death threats were made against McKenna.
"Given the high profile nature of his offence, the media attention that went with it and the reports during the week that he was under threat, we had to have regard to all that," said a spokesman.
He added that this was a common procedure for all high-profile sex offenders to avoid the threat of vigilante action.
A group calling itself Families Against Paedophiles threatened earlier in the week to kill McKenna if he moved back to his home in Co Monaghan.
McKenna was a leading spokesman for Families Against Intimidation and Terror and campaigned in the 1990s for the victims of paramilitary violence. His group received substantial funding from the British government. He was an outspoken critic of intimidation and knee-cappings.
McKenna appeared alongside a number of senior Ulster Unionists at an Ulster Hall rally supporting the now defunct Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1999 and also founded a victim's group called the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau.
But in 2000, he was sentenced at Gavan Circuit Court to three years in prison for sexually assaulting his eldest daughter, Sorcha.
He carried out the assaults between 1985 and 1993 when she was aged between four and 13. She waived her right to anonymity so that her father could be named publicly but expressed disappointment with the short length of the sentence.
The Director of Public Prosecutions subsequently appealed the leniency of the sentence and it was doubled to six years by the Court of Criminal Appeal.
McKenna claimed to have joined the IRA in his youth and he served a prison sentence for arson attacks in the early 1980s. But the IRA issued a statement in the wake of his conviction denying he had ever been a member. His name has been placed on the register of sex offenders.
PA