Former IRA guerrilla leader Brian Keenan dies

BELFAST (Reuters) - Brian Keenan, a former guerrilla leader in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who fought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, has died, his close ally Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams said on Wednesday.

Born in 1942, Keenan still believed close to his death that the IRA could have won its fight for a united Ireland had it continued attacks on the British mainland and focused on business targets as in the 1996 London bombing of Canary Wharf.

"Those IRA Volunteers who took the fight to Britain were particularly brave and had special qualities," Keenan told the republican Sinn Fein party's weekly newspaper An Phoblacht earlier this year.

"That is the only way to fight a war. There cannot be self-doubt, half-measures or holding back," Keenan said in the interview.

Adams said Keenan nevertheless accepted Sinn Fein's political participation in the Northern Ireland peace process and used his clout to move the IRA to support a 1998 peace deal that largely ended three decades of violence.

"He got his head around the peace process...and the need to more forward to a different phase," Adams said.

"He then used his considerable influence to persuade others that the course that Sinn Fein was setting was the course to follow," Adams told Irish broadcaster RTE.

Jonathan Powell, an aide to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has written that there would have been no IRA disarmament without the agreement of Keenan who he described as having once been the biggest single threat to the British state.

Building on the 1998 peace deal, predominantly Catholic Sinn Fein last year agreed to share power in Northern Ireland with Protestant unionists who want the province to remain British.

Sectarian tension between Protestants and the minority Catholic population persists, however, leading to sporadic violence. Small dissident groups on both sides continue to be involved in paramilitary and criminal activities.

Keenan, whose father had served in Britain's Royal Air Force during World War Two, joined the IRA in 1968 and was convicted of conspiring to cause explosions in Britain.

He spent 16 years in jail in England, according to An Phoblacht.

"It is arguable that had we been able to sustain a bombing campaign in London a lot earlier by using Canary Wharf-type bombs then we might have changed the course of the war decisively in the IRA's favor," Keenan told An Phoblacht.

The IRA, responsible for about half of the more than 3,600 people killed during 30 years of conflict, called a ceasefire in 1997 and announced in 2005 it was formally ending its armed struggle, promising to abandon all weapons.

(Writing by Andras Gergely; Editing by Matthew Jones)