The funeral has taken place of Brendan Hughes, a former IRA commander and leader of the first Maze hunger strike in 1980.
Known as "The Dark", Mr Hughes (59) died in hospital at the weekend after a short illness.
Fr Brendan Smyth, who officiated at the funeral Mass in St Peter's Cathedral in west Belfast, said Mr Hughes had never fully recovered from the prison experience and the cost to his health after spending 53 days on hunger strike in the H-blocks.
His coffin, draped in the Tricolour and bearing a black beret and gloves, was carried by Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams and other republicans, including Assembly member Raymond McCartney, who was a fellow hunger striker. The cortege was led by a lone piper.
About 2,000 mourners and onlookers lined the streets around the cathedral in the lower Falls area where he lived. It was the most significant republican funeral in the area since that of veteran IRA man Joe Cahill in 2004.
Mr Hughes was a senior Belfast IRA figure, a prison escaper and later the IRA OC in the Maze at the time of the "dirty protest" in the late 1970s, which led to the first hunger strike.
When that hunger strike was called off, leadership of the republicans in the prison was taken over by Bobby Sands.
On his release from jail in 1986, Mr Hughes gradually parted company with the leadership of Sinn Féin and its role in the peace process, believing they had gone against republican and community principles.
In his homily, Fr Smyth referred to Mr Hughes's decision to call off the hunger strike that he led, believing concessions on the prison uniform had been won.
"We know that when someone has the courage to do the right thing, then nothing but good can come from it, and we know at least one person whose life was immediately saved for him having taken that courageous decision," he said.
He said Mr Hughes had privately confronted many personal troubles since leaving jail.
"When Brendan left prison, he may well have left with only the clothes on his back," he said. "But that is not to say he left empty-handed - there was the baggage that he carried with him that nobody could see." He said Mr Hughes suffered from a series of "mental scars" that came with his imprisonment, from "the treatment he received, the nightmares that would haunt for the rest of his life, and the untold physical damage inflicted on his body that would plague him in later years.
"In recent years Brendan was to speak of that baggage that not only him, but others who were with him at that time [ had]: the depression, the inability to establish lasting and loving relationships, to name but a few. His life after that time could not outrun or forget all that had happened to him and the many like him."