A former commander of the Colombian rebel group, FARC, has said that the organisation adopted IRA technology but soon realised it could not offer FARC much more than improved mortars and remote-control car bombs.
Mr Carlos Alberto Ploter, the most senior member of FARC to defect to the Colombian government, also said there were serious ideological differences between the two outlawed groups, but FARC was willing to exploit the IRA's technology.
Speaking at the conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, in Washington this week, Mr Ploter said FARC realised it had received "the maximum in exchange" it could from the IRA.
"When we had the mortars and the remote-control car bomb devices, and we didn't see that the IRA had developed much beyond that, we felt that we had gotten the maximum in exchange we can get," he said.
However, Mr Ploter, FARC's former political commander, said he had no direct involvement with the IRA and didn't know of any training that occurred in Colombia.
He added he didn't know if the Colombia Three - Mr Niall Connolly, Mr James Monaghan and Mr Martin McCauley - had been members of the IRA.
Mr Ploter said FARC had sought to "absorb" IRA technology but there were serious differences between the two groups.
"First of all the IRA is not compatible with Marxism. It's Catholic, which makes it the antithesis of Marxism. FARC, in contrast, is Marxist-Leninist, it has no concept of religion.
"But what the FARC does have is the capability to understand and absorb what other organisations, independent of ideology, have advanced," he said.