Brian Keenan

Brian Paschal Keenan (17 July 1941 – 21 May 2008 ) was a member of the Army Council of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who received an 18-year prison sentence in 1980 for conspiring to cause explosions, and played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Early life The son of a member of the Royal Air Force, Keenan was brought up in Swatragh, County Londonderry, before his family moved to Belfast. In 1972, Keenan travelled to Tripoli to meet with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in order to acquire arms and finance from his government. In late 1973 Keenan was the linchpin of the kidnap of his former employer at Grundig, director Thomas Niedermayer.

In early 1974, Keenan planned to break Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell out of Long Kesh using a helicopter, in a method similar to Seamus Twomey's escape from Mountjoy Prison in October 1973, but the plan was vetoed by Billy McKee. Keenan was arrested in the Republic of Ireland in mid-1974 and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment for IRA membership. On 17 March 1975 he was shot and wounded while attempting to lead a mass escape from Portlaoise Prison. As the architects of the blueprint—Adams, Bell and Brendan Hughes—were still imprisoned, Martin McGuinness and Keenan toured the country trying to convince the IRA Army Council and middle leadership of the benefits of the restructuring plan, with one IRA member remarking "Keenan was a roving ambassador for Adams".

In December 1975, members of an IRA unit based in London were arrested following the six-day Balcombe Street Siege. The IRA unit had been active in England since late 1974 carrying out a series of bombings, and a few months after his release from prison Keenan visited the unit in Crouch Hill, London, to give it further instructions.

Garda Síochána informer Sean O'Callaghan claimed that Keenan recommended IRA Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey to authorise an attack on Ulster Protestants in retaliation to an increase in sectarian attacks on Catholic civilians by Protestant loyalist paramilitaries, such as the killing of three Catholics in a gun and bomb attack by the Ulster Volunteer Force on Donnelly's Bar in Silverbridge, County Armagh on 19 December 1975. According to O'Callaghan "Keenan believed that the only way, in his words, to put the nonsense out of the Prods [Protestants] was to just hit back much harder and more savagely than them". Soon after the sectarian Kingsmill massacre occurred, when ten Protestant men returning home from their work were ordered out of a minibus they were travelling in, and executed en masse with a machine gun on 5 January 1976. The capture of Keenan was a blow to the IRA, in particular as he was carrying an address book listing his contacts including Palestinian activists in the United Kingdom. In a letter sent from Leicester Prison Keenan wrote that he "emphatically" supported the move and endorsed the Army Council's decision, saying:

It is not enough for Republicans to say, with reference to the Army [IRA], actions speak louder than words. We must never forsake action but the final war to win will be the savage war of peace. To those of us who have struggled for years in a purely military capacity, it must be obvious that if we do not provide honest, recognisable political leadership on the ground, we will lose that war for peace. After the Northern Ireland peace process had become deadlocked over the issue of the IRA decommissiong its arms, Keenan and the other members of the Army Council authorised the Docklands bombing which killed two people and marked the end of the IRA's eighteen-month ceasefire in February 1996. In the same speech he accused the British of "double-dealing" and denounced the Irish government as "spineless".

In November 1998 Keenan addressed a republican rally in Cullyhanna, County Armagh to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of IRA member Michael McVerry. He stated:

I can categorically state the only time the IRA will decommission, we will decommission in agreement with a government of national democracy, a government that derives from the first Dáil. That's when we will decommission—never, ever before...Everybody's saying: 'The prisoners are being released, what's your problem?' Well there's no prisoner was ever in jail to be let out to sell out the struggle and I'm sure none of them would want to be let out if this struggle wasn't going the whole way. Keenan confirmed his continued commitment to the Armalite and ballot box strategy, saying that both political negotiations and violence were "legitimate forms of revolution" and that both "have to be prosecuted to the utmost". Keenan went on to say "The revolution can never be over until we have British imperialism where it belongs—in the dustbin of history", a message aimed at preventing rank-and-file IRA activists defecting to the dissident Real IRA. Keenan resigned from his position on the Army Council in 2005 due to ill-health, and was replaced by Bernard Fox, who had taken part in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. On 6 May 2007 Keenan was guest speaker at a rally in Cappagh, County Tyrone to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the deaths of the so-called "Loughgall Martyrs", eight members of the IRA East Tyrone Brigade killed by the Special Air Service in 1987.

Provisional IRA Chief of Staff It is alleged by the Irish Independent and The Daily Telegraph that Keenan succeeded Thomas "Slab" Murphy as Chief of Staff of the Provisional IRA at some point between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s before he relinquished the role to deal with his poor health caused by cancer.

Death Keenan died of cancer on 21 May 2008 in Cullyhanna, South Armagh.