Fury as Reynolds praises 'remarkable' IRA chief
Mr Reynolds stunned victims' families when he paid tribute to Joe Cahill at his funeral in west Belfast.
As thousands of republicans followed his coffin on the Falls Road, Mr Reynolds declared: "We worked together on the peace process. He was a remarkable man and he played a major part. The only thing I regret is he didn't last long enough to see the process completed. I'm sure it would have been his greatest satisfaction."
But the widow of police constable Gary Meyer, who was shot dead by IRA gunmen in Belfast in June 1990, was horrified by the eulogy.
Iona Meyer said: "They put them up on a pedestal and forget everything they have done.
"But for us victims it's wrong because the grief and hurt is still there and will not go away. It's almost as if they have the God-given right to take life."
Mr Reynolds helped persuade the US authorities to grant Mr Cahill a visa in 1994 so that he could sell the first IRA ceasefire to Irish Americans.
He joined mourners who brought west Belfast to a halt for the ex-Provisional Chief of Staff's funeral.
Mr Cahill, 84, who helped form the modern IRA and shape its ruthless 30-year campaign, died last weekend from asbestosis.
In a paramilitary career spanning decades, he escaped a death sentence for his part in the 1942 murder of police constable Patrick Murphy in Belfast. Cahill was later jailed again for gun-running in 1973.
At one stage during his funeral, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams and the party's chief negotiator Martin McGuinness, the IRA's former No 2 in Derry and now the MP for Mid Ulster, carried the coffin draped in the Tricolour.
There was a guard of honour of men wearing black berets and a lone piper headed the huge procession stewarded by republicans in white shirts and black ties.
It was one of the largest republican funerals seen in west Belfast since the hunger strike death of Bobby Sands in 1981.
The Brighton bomber Patrick Magee; Padraig Wilson, the former IRA leader inside the Maze; Brian Keenan, who sits on the Provos' ruling army council; and top Belfast republicans Eddie Copeland and Bobby Storey all followed Mr Cahill's coffin.
As he delivered a graveside oration at Milltown Cemetery, Mr Adams warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair that elements within his own system are encouraging a backward slide in the Northern peace process.
It was being done to placate unionists who were against change, he said.
The West Belfast MP claimed: "It is the securocrats on the British side and their allies who are calling the shots."
The republican leadership will be heavily involved in intensive make-or-break talks in September in a bid to restore the power sharing executive in Belfast. The executive was suspended last October over unionist claims of an IRA spy ring operating at Stormont.
Mr Adams, a close confidante of Mr Cahill, added: "Tony Blair has said if the process isn't going forward, it will go backwards.
"We have told him in recent times that elements within his own system, particularly within the NIO, are doing their best to subvert progress and to encourage the backward slide."
As a hush fell over the graveyard, folk singer Frances Black broke into a traditional Irish lament, The Bold Fenian Men, after telling the crowd: "This is for Joe."
Earlier, outspoken priest Father Des Wilson had praised Mr Cahill's bravery and struggle to overcome what he described as a refusal of basic rights for many in the North.
The priest told a packed St John's Church: "The history of the years in which Joe lived is like a history of horrors.
"But whatever the crisis, there were men and women like Joe and his companions who responded to the needs of those people who had not created war but too often were the victims of it."
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