Brendan Hughes

IRA commander in Belfast and leader of the H-Block 'dirty protests' of the 1970s

In the 1970s, Brendan Hughes, who has died aged 59, shared a cubicle inside Cage 11 of the Long Kesh internment camp - the Maze prison - in Northern Ireland with Gerry Adams, now the president of Sinn Fein. Hughes had been influential in the formation of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein, its political wing, in the early 1970s, when the Provos split with the Official IRA, which wanted to change tactics and work through constitutional politics.

Hughes was important as a street fighter, an arms smuggler and a strategist. He was involved in making international contacts and organised the arms business, helping to equip the IRA with its signature Armalite rifle, smuggled in from the US. He supported Adams until Sinn Fein moved into constitutional politics, and agreed to share power with the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party in the devolved government at Stormont.

Hughes was born into a working- class Republican family, very much like that of Gerry Adams, in the Lower Falls road area of Belfast. He joined the IRA in 1969, when his uncle, Charles Hughes (killed in 1971), was its Belfast commander.

The IRA was then growing in strength in response to a violent Protestant backlash against Unionist government attempts to reform discrimination against Catholics; its leadership recognised Hughes as an effective street fighter. In many interviews with a BBC television journalist, Peter Taylor, Hughes, a small, swarthy man who was nicknamed "The Dark", talked about making four or five attacks a day. He spoke of firing on British army patrols and about attacking soldiers and robbing banks to fund arms purchases.

Hughes described his normal day: "You would have robbed a bank in the morning, done a float in the afternoon, stuck a bomb and a booby trap out after that, and then maybe had a gun battle or two later that night." A "float" meant going out in a car looking for a British soldier to shoot.

But Hughes could also recall the time before the IRA and Britain became enemies, when British troops were first deployed in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and were seen as being present to protect Roman Catholic houses against Protestant fire bombers. Hughes, who was only in his early 20s then, used to chat to the soldiers, teenagers who came from working-class backgrounds just like his own.

In 1973, however, he was arrested in a raid on a house in the Falls, together with Adams; the pair were badly

beaten and interned in Long Kesh. Six months later Hughes escaped, rolled inside a mattress, and was smuggled across the Irish border in a dustcart. He was given a new identity and quickly returned to the Falls as a toy salesman, Arthur McAllister. He hid in a flat in Malone, a middle-class area near Queen's University, but remained active on the Falls, becoming the IRA commander in Belfast.

When he was arrested again in 1974, and a submachine gun, four rifles, two pistols and several thousand rounds of ammunition were found in his home, he was given a 15-year prison sentence under anti-terrorist legislation and returned to Long Kesh, where he shared a cubicle in Cage 11, known as the Generals' wing, with Adams.

In 1976, he assaulted a prison officer and was sentenced to a further three years, but, because a new criminal status for terrorist prisoners had been intoduced by the British government in March 1976, Hughes was moved from the concentration compounds in the village of Long Kesh into the newly built prison quarters on the same site, the famous H-Blocks.

There he led the protest for the return of the prisoners' political status, refusing to wear prison uniform and then, from mid-1977, beginning the "dirty protest", refusing to wash or

to use prison toilets. In 1980, with four others, he began a hunger strike, but called it off after 53 days, when a deal from the new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, seemed to be on offer and another hunger striker, Sean McKenna, was close to death. In 1981 leadership inside the Maze was taken by Bobby Sands, who began a second hunger strike, during which 10 men, including Sands, died.

Hughes spent 10 years in the Maze, but during that time continued to be influential in the development of IRA strategy inside and outside prison. He continued to have links with international terrorist groups, including ETA, the Basque separatists in Spain.

After his release, he grew disillusioned with Adams as the peace process intensified, but continued to be nostalgic about his street-fighting past and his early, warm relationship with Adams. Adams said of Hughes that he was "a good-hearted generous comrade, quick-tempered but immensely kind. He never fully recovered from the hunger strike. Although he disagreed with the direction taken in recent years, he was held in high esteem by all who knew him."

Hughes's health was badly damaged by the hunger strike and he suffered from heart and eye problems, and arthritis: he died in hospital.

He and his wife, who had a son and a daughter, separated while he was in prison. They all survive him.

· Brendan Hughes, political activist, born October 1948; died February 16 2008

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