Intelligence

Veteran Irish republican Cahill dies

Veteran Irish republican Cahill dies

By Peter Griffiths
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Veteran Irish republican leader Joe Cahill, who escaped execution to become a commander of the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrilla group, has died. He was 84.

"Joe was the father of this generation of republicans," Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said in a statement on Saturday. "He spent a lifetime in struggle."

Cahill, honorary vice president of the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, was a republican icon who rose to the rank of IRA chief of staff during more than 60 years in the movement.

He died in Belfast on Friday after a short illness.

Cahill was one of six IRA men sentenced to hang in 1942 for the murder of a policeman. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but he was released after only eight years under an amnesty related to the World War Two peace treaty.

In 1973, he was arrested aboard a cargo ship carrying five tonnes of weapons and explosives from Libya to Ireland.

"You do me an honour," he told the judge as the three year sentence was passed.

Born Belfast in 1920, Cahill joined the republican movement as a teenager.

He was a founding member of the Provisional IRA, the paramilitary group which emerged in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s after the original IRA lost popular support.

Over the next 30 years, more than 3,600 people were killed during the bitter conflict between Irish nationalists, seeking a united Ireland, and loyalists who want to maintain British rule.

Around half of those deaths were blamed on the IRA, which called a ceasefire in 1994.

Cahill, a married father of seven, expressed "regret" for those killed and once said: "In any war situation, innocent lives are lost."

He took part in negotiations leading to the historic 1998 Good Friday peace accord which was hailed as the document which ended the conflict.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration was criticised in 1994 for granting Cahill a visa to enter the country to explain the impending IRA ceasefire to supporters.

In 2003, Cahill attended talks to revive the stalled peace process in Northern Ireland after the government resumed direct rule in a row over continuing paramilitary activity.

July 24, 2004 at 08:47 AM in IRA | Permalink | TrackBack (51) | Top of page | Blog Home