Mr Paddy Kennedy, a Republican Labour MP for Belfast Central between 1969 and 1972, has died of cancer in Dublin aged 55.
Born in 1943, Mr Kennedy became the leader of the Republican Labour Party in 1970 when Mr Gerry Fitt left to head the new SDLP. He had been prominent in opposition protest against the unionist government in 1969 and was a founding member of NICRA, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
In June 1969 he declared that, if extreme unionists were going to police their side of Belfast, "we must do something to police our end of the city". Three months later he flew to London for a meeting with the then home secretary, Mr James Callaghan, to discuss tension over demands to remove west Belfast barricades.
In 1970 he refused to join the SDLP and withdrew from Stormont a year later. Soon afterwards he introduced Mr Joe Cahill as leader of the Provisional IRA at a Belfast news conference. The Provisionals rejected his offer to send a representative to a conference on the political future of Northern Ireland.
Mr Kennedy failed to be elected to the Stormont Assembly in 1973 as a candidate in West Belfast. In the same year, a case against him at Belfast City Commission for "committing an act calculated to promote the objects of an illegal organisation, the IRA" was dropped.
In 1971, his marriage to his wife Brenda was annulled.
Having lost out in the Stormont election, he left the political limelight and moved to Dublin where he represented various building companies.
In a 1992 television programme, he admitted to intimate knowledge about money and arms supplied by Dublin to Northern republicans.