George Harrison, who has died aged 89, was a New York Irish republican responsible for illegal arms shipments to the IRA that over 25 years amounted to an estimated 2,500 weapons and one million rounds of ammunition.
The weapons included handguns, Armalites and bazookas as well as M60 machineguns.
The deaths inflicted by the IRA never caused him to question republican violence or his part in it. When he expressed concern about the Kingsmill massacre of 1976, in which the IRA killed 10 Protestant workers, he readily accepted the Provisionals' explanation that it was a justified response to sectarian murders by the UVF.
He dismissed electoral politics as a dangerous distraction and saw physical force as the means "to drive the Brits out, lock, stock and barrel".
Most of his working life was spent as a Brinks security guard, but he never saw any irony in the fact that his Irish counterparts required armed police and military escorts to protect them from the guns he sent to Ireland.
Born on May 2nd, 1915, in Shammer, Kilkelly, Co Mayo, he was one of 10 children of a stonecutter and a small shopkeeper. Drawn to militant nationalism, at 16 he joined the IRA. But the East Mayo Brigade never saw action, and in the mid-1930s he left home to work on farms in England.
He returned for a brief stay in 1938 before emigrating to the United States. In New York he worked as a barman and docker. During the second World War he served in the Pacific with the US army. Demobbed, he resumed bar work and joined Brinks in 1947.
He saw America as a place where he could do "a lot for the Irish cause". Joining the James Connolly Club, he became a close friend of Liam Cotter, an IRA veteran who had been interned in the Curragh during the Emergency.
Cotter and Harrison co-operated in procuring weapons for the IRA's Border campaign in the 1950s and were soon joined by others eager to help. Their supplier was George de Meo, a gun-dealer on the fringe of the Mafia, who was a neighbour of Harrison's in Brooklyn.
Money for arms came from various sources, and when Cotter founded the IRA Prisoners' Aid Fund, Mike Quill of the Transport Workers' Union donated $6,000, telling Harrison: "You can use it for the Irish political prisoners or it can go to purchase guns for the Irish Republican Army".
In 1962, as the IRA campaign collapsed, the Cotter-Harrison group severed formal connections with the republican movement because of suspicions that the leadership was "going political". However, they continued to send weapons to "trusted" republicans, and at a meeting with Daithí Ó Conaill in 1970 agreed to supply the Provisionals.
From 1973 onwards they supplied 200-300 weapons a year, most of which were obtained by de Meo from a US marine base in North Carolina. In 1975 Harrison appeared before a grand jury inquiring into illegal arms trafficking, but was not indicted. In the late 1970s the IRA took control of US gunrunning operations, although Harrison retained his function.
After gardaí intercepted a consignment of weapons in Dublin docks, the guns were traced to de Meo, who was arrested and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment. The sentence was halved in return for information about Harrison, who was placed under close surveillance.
Harrison was arrested in 1981 in the midst of organising a major arms shipment and with four others, including Michael Flannery of Noraid, was charged with arms-trafficking. At the subsequent trial the defence successfully argued that the defendants had been snared in a CIA "sting" operation, and the jury found all five men not guilty.
Harrison's gunrunning days were over. Five years later he broke with the Provisionals over their decision to drop abstentionism.
He bitterly opposed Sinn Féin's entry to Leinster House, "an institution imposed on Ireland by British guns and bayonets to serve the interests of British imperialism". In 1994 he denounced the IRA ceasefire as "a surrender" and "a sell-out".
He threw in his lot with Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA and in July this year, when RSF was placed on the US State Department's foreign terrorist list, he vowed to increase his monthly donation to the party. "If the Bush administration wants to jail me, I'm ready," he said.
George Harrison: born May 2nd, 1915; died October 6th, 2004