A former Catholic priest who helped negotiate the IRA ceasefire today
refused to name Provisional IRA men he knew at the time of Bloody Sunday, citing Confessional confidentiality.
Mr Denis Bradley confirmed to the Saville Inquiry that he knew members of the organisation in Derry in January 1972, when 13 men were shot dead as Army Paratroopers moved in after a civil rights march in the city's Bogside district.
But asked to name the IRA members by Counsel to the Inquiry Christopher Clarke QC, he said: ``No... At that particular time I was a Catholic priest.
``Many people spoke to me about many things; people from the Provisional IRA, people from the Official IRA, people from the British Army, people from the RUC.
``Most of it would have been confidential and I would have considered it confessional and I would not be in a position to actually say what they told me.''
Mr Bradley was a 26-year-old curate on Bloody Sunday but left the priesthood later in the 1970s. In the early 1990s he acted as an intermediary between the IRA and British intelligence in securing the IRA ceasefire of August 1994.
During exchanges on day 140 of the inquiry's public hearings, Mr Clarke QC said to him: ``You plainly know the identity of a number of people who were members of the Provisional IRA at the time of Bloody Sunday.
``Your knowledge of who those people were is not solely derived from what you were told in the confessional.''
Mr Bradley replied: ``That is questionable. What I know by hearsay and what I know by rumour and what I know by impression is different from what I know in actuality of somebody actually telling me something which I would consider confessional.
``What I am saying to you is all confessional issues do not take place in a confessional box.
``So if someone told me they were within the IRA or someone within the British Army told me something that they had done, even though it did not take place within the confessional box - if it took place in the front room of the Parochial House - I still considered that confessional.''
Other witnesses have been quizzed by the inquiry about the IRA, with the tribunal and its lawyers claiming they need to track 1972 members down to establish what the organisation was doing on Bloody Sunday if they are to establish the full truth of the day.
One Provisional IRA man has given evidence to the inquiry at Derry's Guildhall - but not about the organisation itself. A statement has been taken from an Official IRA quartermaster in the city.
Another five Officials have come forward in the past year as has Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness who is understood to have admitted in writing having been the Provisionals' second-in-command in Derry in January 1972 - but denied claims by a MI5 agent that he opened fire that day.