It took more than half a century but the family of Tom Williams, the last IRA man to be executed in the North, was finally able to bury him in consecrated ground yesterday.
Hanged in 1942 for killing a Catholic policeman, Williams (19) had been buried in an unmarked grave in Belfast's Crumlin Road Prison.
After a lengthy campaign by republicans, his body was exhumed last year. Williams was one of six IRA men sentenced to death for killing Constable Patrick Murphy on Easter Sunday, 1942. He was the only one to be hanged.
West Belfast came to a standstill yesterday with several thousand people lining the funeral route. Shops were shuttered and black flags and Tricolours hung from lamp-posts.
Many people carried red roses. The attendance included Mr Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, and the republican veteran, Mr Joe Cahill (80), who was one of those sentenced to death with Williams but granted a last-minute reprieve. Both men helped carry the coffin.
Mr Cahill placed a Tricolour on the coffin outside St Paul's Church on the Falls Road. Father Paddy O'Donnell said that although there was sadness that Williams had been "snatched cruelly away" as a young man, there was also joy that his body had been returned.
"Like the prodigal son he has come home again. He is with his own people and will soon rest with them in consecrated ground," Father O'Donnell said.
When he was 17, Williams had been an air-raid warden during the Blitz and occasionally "went across the border into the Shankill" to take women and children to safety in the crypt of Clonard Monastery.
Williams was buried in Milltown Cemetery, but in a grave beside his grandfather, mother and two sisters, not in the republican plot.
His death had already been recorded on the gravestone: "In proud memory of Lieutenant Thomas Williams, C coy IRA, executed 2 September 1942 in Belfast Prison aged 19".
Republicans had failed to persuade the Williams family, several of whom now live in Canada, to agree to him being buried alongside other IRA members.
Mr Cahill said the funeral brought back memories of Williams. "I was with Tom for the last 4 1/2 weeks of his life . . . He was one of the bravest people I ever met. On the morning of his execution there was not a quiver in his body."
Several thousand people are expected to attend a commemoration for Williams at the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery on Sunday.