Rebel IRA gunmen fire volley over comrade’s coffin
DUBLIN — Three masked Irish Republican Army dissidents fired a volley of gunfire over a dead comrade’s coffin Thursday in the most public display of paramilitary defiance Northern Ireland has seen in years.
The militant tribute was paid to John Brady, a 40-year-old IRA veteran who hanged himself last weekend in police custody. Such funeral displays by outlaws were once common in Northern Ireland but had disappeared during the past decade of peacemaking and the sharp decline in political bloodshed.
Leaders of the British Protestant majority complained that police should have tried to arrest the gunmen, but officers said they kept a distance to ensure no conflict with the 400 or so mourners.
Brady’s family, friends and past colleagues from various factions of the IRA gathered outside his sister’s home in Strabane, a hardline and overwhelmingly Catholic border town in Northern Ireland.
His casket was outside the door; supporters draped it with the green, white and orange flag of the Republic of Ireland, then placed on it a black beret and leather gloves, the typical topping for an IRA member’s coffin.
Since 1997 — the year most IRA members ceased fire following a failed 27-year campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom — they had stopped firing live rounds over members’ caskets.
The IRA in 2005 professed to have handed over all its weapons to disarmament officials, but splinter groups opposed to the cease-fire continue to mount attacks — and put a few of their weapons on show Thursday.
Four men wearing balaclavas and fatigues walked out the door. Three were armed with handguns; the fourth gave them commands in Gaelic, the little-used Irish tongue. They fired about 20 shots as some mourners covered their ears and others cheered and clapped.
All three gunmen wore surgical gloves, a sign they were protecting their skin from gunfire traces that police might use to convict them of paramilitary activity.
In decades past, police in riot gear backed by British troops would have stormed the scene in a typically failed effort to arrest the gunmen. This time, police tucked themselves in side streets and did not interrupt as mourners carried the coffin to a hearse, passing dozens of men wearing white shirts and black berets. A police helicopter kept watch overhead.
Protestant hard-liners said police should have intervened.
“The fact that three armed terrorists can be allowed to engage in their criminality in such a public manner must be challenged,” said Willie Frazer, who lost several relatives to IRA attacks and runs a pressure group called Families Acting for Innocent Relatives.
Brady was convicted in 1991 of murdering an off-duty policeman using a bomb placed under the victim’s private car. Like more than 200 other IRA inmates, he won early parole as part of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday accord.
He was ordered back to prison in 2003 after being accused by British authorities of joining IRA dissidents and renewing efforts to kill off-duty police and soldiers. At the time of his suicide, he had been free on a weekend parole but was arrested Friday for allegedly assaulting a family member. He was found dead in his police holding cell the next morning.
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