Brendan Hughes: Former IRA leader, prisoner and hunger-striker Brendan Hughes attracted most attention after his release from jail for damning as a sell-out the new republicanism of Gerry Adams, a tragic comment on his own life.
As a young man and one of Adams's best friends, his frenetic rate of shootings and bombings made him revered in the IRA. He helped Adams to plan a reorganised IRA from their shared prison cell. He spent his last years plagued by illnesses stemming from his hunger strike and questioning the point of so much violence and suffering. He still displayed the much-printed jail photograph of Adams and himself. Adams rushed to the hospital when he heard Hughes was dying.
Remarkably frank to many interviewers, he admitted that he had been happiest in the early 1970s. "There was a simplicity about it - that we would fight the Brits and force them down Belfast Lough and out." There was never any real question though of him joining the dissidents who wanted to continue "the war".
For Hughes, the war went wrong in jail when he led then called off a hunger strike in 1980 because he believed a fellow striker was dying. It had been a chaotic protest. He went on the strike himself and all the strikers stopped food simultaneously. He made his final decisions after a 53-day fast.
The outside organisation tried at first to convince themselves and the media that the strikers had won cast-iron concessions. The stage was set for the following year's hunger strike, which took the lives of 10 prisoners and dozens more in violence on the streets. It also gave Sinn Féin the platform for its rise to dominance of Northern nationalism.
Hughes was born on the Grosvenor Road off the Lower Falls. He wanted revenge, he told journalist Ed Moloney, for attacks on Belfast's Catholic districts by "loyalists, the B Specials, the RUC, the British army . . . I had relatives in Bombay Street who were burnt out and I felt the desire to get back at the people who were doing it."
In the early 1970s, as he told BBC journalist Peter Taylor: "You might have robbed a bank in the morning, done a float [ gone out in a car looking for British soldiers] in the afternoon, stuck a bomb and a booby trap out after that and then maybe had a gun battle or two later that night." (The IRA shot 42 soldiers dead in 1971, 64 the next year, on average a soldier a week. Soldiers killed 26 IRA members over the same period.)
He had harrowing memories. One was the death of a 19-year-old soldier left behind on the Falls in March 1973 by his patrol, then surrounded by women who held him and clawed his face, another soldier said, until an IRA man arrived to kill him. Hughes said some of those present told him "he was only a kid, the young fellow was crying for his mother . . . It bothers me when I think about that young soldier sometimes."
Hughes was briefly the IRA's Belfast commander. Under the name Arthur McAllister he rented a flat beside a large house off the Malone Road, where he was arrested in May 1974, the month of the loyalist workers strike.
The house also contained weapons, ammunition and a document the army presented as a plan to erase Protestant areas of the North but was instead a "Doomsday" plan to protect Catholics against all-out loyalist attack.
He was sentenced to 15 years for possession of weapons and for his earlier escape. He was later given another sentence for a jail riot. He is survived by his daughter and son.
Brendan Hughes: born October 1948, died February 16th, 2008.