The Irish government said on Tuesday that leaders of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army (IRA)-linked political party, have stepped down from the IRA command, a likely prelude to a new peace move.
Justice Minister Michael McDowell said senior police had briefed him that Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, as well as Irish lawmaker Martin Ferris, had quit the IRA's ruling seven-member command.
"That's my understanding, yes," said McDowell, who in February was the first Irish government leader to identify the Sinn Fein trio as IRA commanders.
Adams has always denied IRA membership, but several authoritative histories of the Sinn Fein-IRA movement identify him as having been a senior commander since the mid-1970s of the outlawed group.
McGuinness has admitted being an IRA commander and served two short prison terms in the mid-1970s for membership. Police in 1984 caught Ferris trying to smuggle a shipload of weapons from Boston to Ireland; he spent eight years in prison.
Adams, speaking before McDowell's comments, denied reports that he, McGuinness and Ferris had stepped down. "We can't stand down from a body of which we were not members," Adams said.
The apparent effort to increase distance between the leaders of the IRA and Sinn Fein, a legal political party that represents most Catholics in Northern Ireland, comes ahead of a widely expected peace declaration from the IRA command.
McDowell said he didn't think that the IRA demotions of Adams, McGuinness and Ferris "amounts to a severance between the two organizations. It's an acknowledgement, in my view, that there was a very structured link between them in the past."
Sinn Fein leaders have faced broad pressure from the British, Irish and US governments for the IRA to issue a clear-cut statement renouncing violence and crime and pledging to disarm fully -- to disband in practice if not in name.
"The IRA needs to mutate to an extent it is no longer an unlawful organization," McDowell said.
"There is no question of the governments on either side of the [Irish] border tolerating the continued existence of an unlawful organization," he said.
He said IRA commanders must "decommission all their weapons in their entirety, every single pistol, every single bullet -- the lot."
Pressure has been building since December, when the IRA helped to torpedo a painstakingly negotiated deal to revive a joint Catholic-Protestant administration, the central objective of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord. The power-sharing proposals failed when the IRA rejected Protestant demands that its disarmament be recorded for public consumption.
Since then, continuing IRA activities have come under an increasingly critical spotlight. Police and international leaders have accused the IRA of mounting the world's biggest bank robbery, a heist in Belfast on Dec. 20. The IRA is also accused of running a massive money-laundering operation and of intimidating its host Catholic communities -- a practice highlighted when IRA members knifed a Catholic civilian to death on Jan. 30.
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