D. Keating, 105; fought for unified Ireland

Dan Keating, an IRA member and the last surviving veteran of Ireland’s 1919-21 war of independence from Britain, died Wednesday in County Kerry in southwest Ireland, his nursing home said. He was 105.

Keating joined the 1st Kerry Brigade of the Irish Republican Army in 1920 and took part in two major 1921 ambushes that left at least five police officers, four British soldiers and five IRA members dead.

“When you are involved in an ambush with a crowd of men, you wouldn’t know who killed who. But the prospect never troubled me,” Keating said in a March interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.

Born on a farm near Castlemaine in County Kerry in 1902, he joined the IRA faction that opposed the 1921 peace treaty with Britain and fought against former IRA colleagues in Ireland’s 1922-23 civil war. He eventually was captured by Irish Free State forces and spent seven months in a prisoner-of-war camp. He served several short terms in prison for insurrectionist activity, including an aborted assassination attempt of a former general of Free State forces, and in 1939 and 1940 he participated in an IRA bombing campaign on London.

Keating spent his entire adult life committed to the most hard-line branch of Irish republicanism. He said Ireland should never be at peace until the border dividing the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland -- both states that he considered illegitimate -- was eliminated and the island united under one government.

In 1970, he switched his allegiance to a new, Northern Ireland-based faction called the Provisional IRA that spent 27 years trying to overthrow the British territory.

When the Provisionals called a 1997 cease-fire and supported Sinn Fein politicians’ push for a negotiated settlement, he again switched support to a breakaway faction, Republican Sinn Fein, that opposed compromise and backed IRA dissidents’ continued bombings. He became honorary patron of the fringe party in 2004.

Keating so opposed the existence of the Irish Republic that he refused to accept the state’s old-age pension. In 2002, he also refused a $3,500 award from President Mary McAleese that is offered to all Irish citizens who reach age 100; Keating argued that she wasn’t the real president of Ireland.

Keating had no immediate survivors.