Ex-IRA leader takes up policing role

Local & National

Thursday, March 27, 2008

A former leader of the IRA inside the Maze Prison is to join a District Policing Partnership.

Sean Lynch will become the most senior member of the terrorist organisation to sign up to policing when he joins the Fermanagh DPP on April 1.

He was seriously wounded and fellow IRA member Seamus McElwaine was shot dead when the SAS opened fired on them as they prepared to ambush a security force patrol with a huge landmine on the Lisnaskea to Rosslea road in Co Fermanagh in April 1986.

He was arrested and jailed for 12 years, serving as Officer Commanding the IRA inside the Maze from 1992 until 1995. He was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and has unsuccessfully stood for Sinn Fein at both Assembly and District Council elections.

His appointment to the Fermanagh DPP has been described by local UUP Assembly member Tom Elliott as "a total disgrace".

Mr Elliott said: "The IRA Army Council has not yet stood down and I think it's a total disgrace that a convicted IRA member is now going to serve on the DPP, as that is certainly not what I thought the emphasis of local policing was all about.

"As far as I am concerned the IRA is still in place, and I wonder is Sean Lynch still a part of it. If this is what Northern Ireland policing has come to it's a very sad state of affairs."

Mr Lynch said he had "as much right as any other citizen" to join the DPP. "Republican and nationalist communities have suffered decades of bad policing, so my role, and that of other Republican representatives on the DPPs, will be to hold the police to account," he said.

"I view my role on the DPPs in the same way as I have all my roles since joining the Republican movement in the 1970s. The nature of the struggle has certainly changed, but our commitment to bringing about a united Ireland has not."

Mr Lynch, chairman of Sinn Fein in Fermanagh, admitted he did not think he would ever see the day when he would be working alongside the PSNI. " But then there are many twists and turns that nobody, including myself, thought they would see," he added.

Fermanagh DPP chairman, DUP councillor Bert Johnston, said he may have certain grievances over the appointment but insisted he would be able to work alongside Mr Lynch as he believes Sinn Fein has "moved on".