Joe O'Connell (Irish republican) security wing of Portlaoise Prison, Ireland, in early 1998. They were presented by Gerry Adams to the 1998 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis as 'our Nelson Mandelas', and were released together with Brendan Dowd and Liam Quinn in 1999 as part of the Belfast Agreement. Joe O'Connell (Irish republican) Martin Joseph O'Connell (born 1951), better known as Joe, is an Irish republican and a former volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). He is most noted for having been a member of the Balcombe Street gang. O'Connell was born in Kilkee, in rural County Clare, 'a stronghold of Gaelic-speaking inhabitants
History of Sinn Féin majority. Ó Brádaigh and about twenty other delegates walked out, and re-convened in a Dublin hotel to form a new party, Republican Sinn Féin. Tom Maguire, the last surviving member of the Second Dáil, whose support had been of importance in the formation of the Provisional IRA, rejected the new policy and supported Republican Sinn Féin. What would become known as the Northern Ireland peace process began in 1986 when Father Alec Reid, of the Clonard monastery in West Belfast, wrote to SDLP leader John Hume and to the Irish opposition leader Charles Haughey, to try to initiate direct talks