Sean Mac Stiofain, who died on May 11th aged 73, was a leading figure in the split in the IRA in 16 and was the first chief of staff of the more hard-line Provisional faction which took over the leadership of the republican movement in subsequent years.
But Sean Mac Stiofain had been replaced as chief of staff in 1973 after he ended a 57-day hunger strike while serving a six-month sentence for IRA membership. He ended the hunger strike on the orders of the Army Council, which may have found it becoming an embarrassment, and he never regained a position of influence in the IRA or Provisional Sinn Fein.
The high point of his influence came in the summer of 1972 when he and his senior colleagues agreed on an IRA ceasefire to enable negotiations to open with the British government. Sean Mac Stiofain was on the IRA delegation which delivered its demands to the then Secretary of State, William Whitelaw, at a meeting in a private house in London.
The ceasefire broke down soon afterwards and Sean Mac Stiofain was arrested in Dublin the following November after an interview with RTE which resulted in the sacking of the RTE Authority. His subsequent hunger and thirst strike led to tumultuous scenes in Dublin and protests outside the Mater Hospital where he was visited by the then Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Dermot Ryan, and his predecessor, Dr John Charles McQuaid.
An attempt to rescue him by an IRA squad, of whom two were disguised as priests, failed and he was transferred to the Curragh military hospital for the rest of his sentence.
John Edward Drayton Stephenson was born in Leytonstone, east London, on February 17th, 1928. His Protestant mother claimed she was from Belfast and his father was also said to have had some Irish blood.
He left school in 1944 at 16 and worked in the building trade before being conscripted into the RAF a year later. After national service, he became increasingly involved with Irish organisations in Britain and began to learn Irish. He first met his wife Maire, who was from Rochestown, Co Cork, at a dance in an Irish club in London.
He also became involved with the IRA as it was beginning to gear up for the 1950s campaign. In 1953, Sean Mac Stiofain was arrested following an IRA raid on the armoury of Felsted public school. Also held were Cathal Goulding - later to become chief of staff of the IRA before the split in 1969 - and Manus Canning. The British police seized the van carrying the stolen weapons and the three IRA men were sentenced to five years' imprisonment. After his release, Sean Mac Stiofain joined his wife and young family in Ireland and became known under the Irish version of his name. He worked at various jobs for Irish language organisations but remained involved with the Republican movement and the IRA, while disapproving of their increasingly Marxist ideology under Goulding's leadership.
In 1966, Sean Mac Stiofain was appointed IRA intelligence officer after he moved to Navan, where he continued to work for Irish language bodies.
A tall, well-built man, Sean Mac Stiofain was regarded as a rather dour personality who did not drink or smoke. He was a devout Catholic and was infuriated by an article in the United Irishman, condemning the reciting of the Rosary at republican commemorations as "sectarian".
For refusing to distribute the newspaper, he was suspended from the republican movement for six months. He was described by a former colleague as "a very rigid kind of person. He is not a person who thinks a lot. A courageous person in the physical sense, but at the same time not a person who has an accurate feeling about the situation in Ireland".
When violence erupted in Northern Ireland in August 1969, the tensions in the IRA between the socialist aims of the Goulding leadership and the traditional militarist wing represented by Sean Mac Stiofain and some Northern members of the Army Council made a breach inevitable. In his autobiography, Revolutionary in Ireland (1975), he set out the aims of the Provisional IRA as moving from "area defence" to "combined defence and retaliation" and then a "third phase of launching an all-out offensive action against the British occupation system". He is said to have taken part in an unsuccessful attack on Crossmaglen RUC station in August 1969.
At the July 1972 meeting in London with William Whitelaw, Sean Mac Stiofain was flown to Britain in an RAF aircraft accompanied by five other leading IRA figures, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Sean Mac Stiofain read out the IRA proposals which included the British government declaring it was "for the whole people of Ireland acting and voting as a unit to decide the future of Ireland". It was also "to give an immediate declaration of its intent to withdraw from Irish soil" by January 1st, 1975.
A further meeting was fixed for a week later as Whitelaw said he was not "agreeing entirely" with the IRA proposals, but it never took place as the IRA ceasefire broke down following an altercation between nationalists and the British army in Lenadoon, Belfast.
The next few months were to see some of the worst violence, including "Bloody Friday" on July 21st, when the IRA set off 22 bombs in less than two hours, killing nine people and injuring 130 severely. After Sean Mac Stiofain was arrested in Dublin on November 11th as he was being driven away from his RTE interview his IRA career was effectively over.
He immediately went on hunger and thirst strike and at his trial a week later, when he was sentenced to six months, he shouted at the three judges from the stretcher where he was lying in a weakened state: "I will be dead in six days. Live with that." Sean Mac Stiofain is survived by his wife, Maire, and his three daughters, Catherine, Moira and Sinead.
Sean Mac Stiofain (John Edward Drayton Stephenson): born 1928; died, May 2001