Funeral takes place of former IRA leader Cahill

The funeral was held in west Belfast this morning of veteran republican Joe Cahill, who died last week.

The ceremony, at St John's Church, Falls Road, was attended by thousands of Sinn Féin members and supporters from throughout Ireland.

Among those who carried Mr Cahill's Tricolour-draped coffin on the short procession from his home to the church were Sinn Féin's Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness. The cortege was flanked by a number of men in black berets and combat uniforms.

Mr Cahill is being buried at Milltown Cemetery. It was one of the largest republican funerals in Belfast since the death of Bobby Sands in 1981.

Former taoiseach Mr Albert Reynolds was among those attending the funeral. Mr Reynolds described the republican as a hugely influential figure in moving the provisionals away from violence.

The ex-taoiseach said: "We worked together on the peace process. He was a remarkable man and he played a major part. The only thing I regret is he didn't last long enough to see the process completed. I'm sure it would have been his greatest satisfaction."

Joe Cahill flanked by Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, poses for photographs during the launch of his biography in Belfast, in October 2002

Mr Cahill, who died on Friday aged 84, was an unapologetic physical-force republican and a pivotal figure in the republican movement in the second half of the 20th century.

A small, balding man invariably dressed in nondescript clothes, he cut something of an incongruous figure from a bygone age among the Sinn Féin elite of the last decade.

Despite this, he was regarded as an icon among the party faithful, a reminder of the historical context which fuels their ideology.  Mr Cahill began his 60-year path of violent republicanism in the early 1940s.

He was convicted of the murder of a Catholic RUC constable in an ambush in west Belfast in 1942 and sentenced to death. His sentence, and that of three other members of his gang, was commuted to life imprisonment four days before he was due to be hung after the intervention of the-then Pope. Only the leader of the gang, Tom Williams, did not escape the gallows.

Mr Cahill was released from prison in 1949, whereupon he joined the predominantly Protestant workforce at the Harland and Wolff (H&W) shipyard in Belfast.

If was during this time that he contracted the asbestosis that would eventually kill him. He was part of a large group of ex-shipyard workers who sued H&W, winning £30,000 in compensation last May.

Mr Cahill soon rejoined the IRA, finding himself interned without trial in 1956. He was eventually released after the IRA campaign collapsed in 1962.

He maintained a lower profile during the 1960s, until the advent of massive sectarian conflict towards the end of the decade. He was said to have been particularly affected by the abuse meted out to the IRA by Catholic communities for failing to protect them from loyalist mobs.

He said Catholics welcomed the British army with open arms because they regarded them as the only people capable of protecting them. "People collaborated with the enemy because the IRA had betrayed them," he said.

He was instrumental in setting up the Provisional IRA in 1970 when the republican movement split. He was elected to the  first army council and subsequently became the IRA commander in Belfast, overseeing a brutal campaign of bombings and shootings. The British authorities responded by re-introducing internment without trial.

Mr Cahill was jailed in 1973 by a court in Dublin for gun-running from Libya after the cargo ship Claudiawas intercepted off the Waterford coast carrying a five-ton arsenal of weaponry. He was given a three-year sentence but released early on the grounds of ill-health.

He spent most of the 1980s involved in fundraising and training activities. He was arrested in Dublin cafe in possession of $80,000, which was confiscated. He was deported from the United States two years later in a bid to stem the flow of money from sympathetic Americans.

Despite receding from the republican limelight in his later years, he is regarded as being instrumental in securing the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the IRA's subsequent move into largely political means.

He was given the task of selling the political route to IRA's financial base in the United States and was granted a visa to visit that country by President Bill Clinton, despite British protestations.

Mr Cahill received a standing ovation at Sinn Féin's ardfheis in Dublin last year when he told delegates: "We have won the war, now let us win the peace."

Mr Adams last week described Mr Cahill as "both a leader and a servant of the republican cause" who spent a lifetime in struggle.

"He was an unapologetic physical force republican who fought when he felt that was the only option but he also significantly stood for peace and was a champion of the Sinn Féin peace strategy, travelling to the UN on many occasions on behalf of the party."

In 1956 Mr Cahill married Annie Magee. She survives him, along with their son and six daughters.