The IRA's final decommissioning acts occurred at "nine different places", over "nine days", according to Fr Alec Reid, one of two clergymen who witnessed the decommissioning.
"That shows you how much guns were got rid of," said Fr Reid, during a 50-minute interview that he and Methodist minister Rev Harold Good gave to The Irish Times in Springfield, Massachusetts, last Friday.
"They decommissioned everything they possibly could," Fr Reid insisted. Neither man would discuss the dates or specific locations, as per the terms of their involvement in decommissioning.
On September 26th, 2005, the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning reported that final IRA disarmament had involved "ammunition, rifles, machine guns, mortars, missiles, handguns, explosives, explosive substances and other arms".
The three-member commission said the IRA's representative indicated that the arms represented all hidden stockpiles. The Rev Harold Good, a former Methodist Church president, and Fr Reid, a Redemptorist priest, then issued a statement saying that "beyond any shadow of doubt, the arms of the IRA have now been decommissioned".
The Democratic Unionist Party initially dismissed their assessment.
Since last year, Mr Good and Fr Reid have refused to give specifics about the process, citing a confidentiality pledge that they gave to the IRA.
The Rev Good stressed to The Irish Times that divulging details concerning amounts of weaponry decommissioned or the methods used, "could cost lives, in addition to betraying the huge trust invested in us".
Such is their devotion to their secrecy vow that Mr Good initially protested Fr Reid's divulging of the "nine sites in nine days" information, before finally being convinced that it was non-specific enough.
"People want to know if we were blindfolded, this, that and the other thing. All I say is we were treated with utmost respect - for ourselves, and the role that we had to play," Mr Good said.
"To me, what was even more important than what I saw was what I heard, which was: 'The war is over. We're not going back there. Thank God we've now completed this exercise.'
"These were people who could have lived next door to you, people you could have met on a bus trip," he added. "These were not grotesque people. These were my neighbours. These were my fellow countrymen."
Fr Reid said they were accompanied to each site by the IRA man in charge and at least one armed IRA guard. Other IRA men met them and the commission at each site. The clergymen said the last weapon decommissioned was one shouldered by an IRA man who had accompanied them throughout the entire process.
"He took the gun off his shoulder and handed it symbolically to the general," said Mr Good. "And it was as if we hadn't thought of this gun, as if it hadn't been part of it all. And he handed it to him. And we all fell silent at that moment."
Fr Reid, a Tipperary-born priest who has worked for nearly 40 years at the Clonard monastery in Belfast's Falls Road area, was a key backstage conduit between republicans and the Government during the crucial early years of the peace process.
Mr Good was based on the loyalist Shankill Road when the Troubles began in 1969. He too spent years involved in peace-building efforts, before being cast into the spotlight via his decommissioning role.
They were invited to Massachusetts by Democratic congressman Richard Neal to speak at Elms College in Chicopee last week.