Martin Meehan, 62; onetime IRA commander who advocated peace

Martin Meehan, a onetime Irish Republican Army commander who spurred IRA members toward compromise, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack in his Belfast home, the Sinn Fein party said. He was 62.

Meehan was among the first IRA members arrested in August 1969, the month Britain deployed its army as would-be peacekeepers amid Protestant vs. Catholic rioting. He spent 18 years in prison for a wide range of offenses, but became a firm advocate for peace and compromise in Northern Ireland.

Meehan was born in 1945 in Ardoyne, a tough Catholic enclave in North Belfast. He left school at 15 and began working on Belfast’s docks. He joined the IRA in the mid-1960s and eventually became the commander in Ardoyne, where he directed sniper attacks against British foot patrols.

He was caught and jailed but escaped from a Belfast prison in December 1971 and fled to the Republic of Ireland. Irish police arrested him a month later.

He was detained without trial from August 1972 to December 1975, when Britain ended its practice of treating IRA inmates as prisoners of war and began processing their cases in criminal courts.

Meehan was convicted in 1980 of leading the torture of a 17-year-old Belfast boy suspected of being an informer. Meehan, insisting he was not involved, pursued a 66-day hunger strike that ended only with intervention from Catholic Church leaders.

Soon after his 1985 parole, he was put behind bars again for kidnapping, torturing and preparing to execute a British soldier.

Paroled again in 1994, Meehan became a prominent activist for the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party.

When the central goal of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord -- a Catholic-Protestant administration that would govern Northern Ireland -- repeatedly broke down because of the IRA’s refusal to disarm, Meehan proved surprisingly pragmatic on the point, suggesting that the IRA would need to renounce violence fully.

“The war, in my opinion, has been over for a long time,” Meehan said in 2002, shortly after power-sharing collapsed.

Meehan was a Sinn Fein candidate in several elections, narrowly failing to win a seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2003.

He is survived by his second wife, Briege, and several children from both marriages.