Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army" in English language version.
It is said he was brought onto the Army Council in the 1990s by Brian Keenan, the hard-line IRA Chief of Staff among whose policies was the genocide of Protestants living in Border areas
It is understood the current 'Chief' assumed the role on Brian Keenan's death in May 2008 and is very much in his vein of thinking.
After the IRA resumed its truce in 1997, Sinn Fein helped negotiate a 1998 peace accord that proposed the total disarmament of the IRA by mid-2000. Keenan, who replaced Thomas "Slab" Murphy as the IRA's chief of staff in 1998, quickly ruled out this prospect, arguing that the group would disarm only in co-operation with a future all-Ireland government...the onset of cancer which forced (Keenan) to step down from the Army Council in 2002.
