The 42-year-old man who walked into Fitzgibbon Street Garda station and shot himself in the head on Monday evening was at the centre of the judicial delisting controversy in the Special Criminal Court in December 1996.
It is not clear why Mr Colm Peake shot himself, although gardaí say it was known he had been drinking and was seen acting erratically near Fitzgibbon Street station shortly before he walked into the reception area and shot himself.
Last evening he was described as critically ill in hospital. The bullet he fired from a pistol passed through his head, causing severe brain damage.
Mr Peake, who came originally from Divis Flats in west Belfast, was once associated with the splinter republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).
In the mid-1980s, he spent time in Paris and was associated with a number of left-wing figures there who were members of the INLA's political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP).
When the INLA broke up in a series of bloody feuds in the 1980s and 1990s, it is understood Mr Peake moved to Madagascar, the island off the east coast of Africa, and lived there for a number of years with a French woman.
Sources in Belfast reported that he returned to the city at the time of the republican and loyalist ceasefires. He was described as a withdrawn figure who spent days walking in the two main graveyards in west Belfast, the City and Milltown cemeteries, where several of his former associates who were killed in feuds were buried.
In is believed he came to Dublin in 1995 and settled in the north inner city. He was arrested by gardaí in November 1995 and charged with possession of a 9 mm pistol and ammunition at Beaumont Hospital.
Mr Peake was charged before the Special Criminal Court and was remanded by the panel of three judges, including Judge Dominic Lynch.
However, it subsequently emerged that as a result of an oversight, Judge Lynch had not been advised his retirement from that court had been accepted by government and he should no longer have been sitting.
This led to a number of habeas corpus applications, and several prisoners had to be brought from Portlaoise Prison, returned to the court, freed and then rearrested and recharged.
Mr Peake was granted bail but failed to present himself for rearrest.