ACHIEVING A powersharing administration with the Rev Ian Paisley as First Minister would not have been possible but for the work of Brian Keenan, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said at the IRA leader's funeral in west Belfast on Saturday.
Mr Adams, who gave the funeral oration, said Mr Keenan "loved the IRA", adding: "He was never a war monger, but he had a justifiable sense of pride in the IRA's ability to take on and fight the British army to a standstill." "But he saw the IRA as an instrument. His commitment was to the people and to the Republic. The army was a means to that end.
He added: "He was central to securing the support of the IRA leadership and rank and file for a whole series of initiatives which made the peace process possible."
Over 2,000 people attended the funeral. At his own request, there was no church service for the 66-year-old father-of-six. Keenan was a senior IRA figure for 40 years and orchestrated some of its bloodiest attacks.
Among the senior republicans who attended the funeral were Bobby Storey and Seán Murray, MEPs Bairbre de Brun and Mary Lou McDonald, Senator Pearse Doherty, Assembly members Conor Murphy, Gerry Kelly and John O'Dowd, and former Sinn Féin head of publicity, Danny Morrison. A ceremony was held at the republican commemoration garden at Ballymurphy in west Belfast, only a few hundred yards from his home. His remains were cremated at Roselawn Cemetery.
Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness draped a tricolour over his coffin at his home at New Barnsley Park. A black beret and gloves were also placed on the coffin.
A group of 66 men and women in white shirts and black trousers and skirts, and wearing black armbands, paraded in front of the cortege. At the entrance to the garden, four members of the Balcombe Street Siege gang - the bombing unit that Mr Keenan organised in England in the mid-1970s - took the final lift of the coffin.
