Three convicted IRA members will take the majority of Sinn Fein’s ministries in Northern Ireland’s incoming power-sharing Executive next month.

As the Province’s four main parties entitled to Cabinet seats in the Executive announced which portfolios they would be seeking, Sinn Fein revealed that its team would include Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister, as well as Gerry Kelly and Conor Murphy.

Mr Kelly, 54, was convicted of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, in which one person died and 180 were injured. In 1983 he led the Maze prison breakout by Provisional IRA prisoners, in which a prison officer died of a heart attack after being stabbed.

Mr Kelly was eventually found in the Netherlands, from where he was suspected of playing a role in the IRA’s mainland Europe campaign aimed at British Army bases.

He was extradited back to Northern Ireland and, after his release from prison, became a senior Sinn Fein member. At the time of the party’s first talks with the Government more than a decade ago, he was reportedly serving as the IRA’s “adjutant general”.

He represents North Belfast in the Assembly and has been Sinn Fein’s justice and police spokesman.

Conor Murphy, the MP for Newry and Armagh, served five years for possession of weapons and membership of the Provisional IRA. He has been tipped as a successor to Gerry Adams as party leader.

Mr McGuinness admitted to being an IRA leader at the time of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972, and has been named as a former chief of staff of the Provisional IRA under parliamentary privilege, in books quoting senior republican sources and by senior security and government sources.

The same sources say that he, along with Mr Adams, remains a member of the IRA’s ruling “army council”.

These three men will be joined by Caitriona Ruane, 44, a former Wimbledon junior tennis competitor from Co Mayo, who led the “Bring Them Home” campaign on behalf of the Colombia Three, who were found guilty of training the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, in IRA combat techniques.

Completing the Sinn Fein lineup is Michelle Gildernew, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, who created a furore during the recent election campaign when she said that if she had information about republican weapons dumps she would not provide it to the police.

Sinn Fein surprised Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists by choosing the education portfolio as its first choice under the d’Hondt system of distributing the Cabinet seats.

Mr McGuinness was Education Minister in the previous Executive, which was suspended in October 2002 over allegations of an IRA spy-ring at Stormont.

Mr McGuinness’s final act as Education Minister was to abolish Northern Ireland’s grammar school system — a decision that the Democratic Unionists reversed as part of last October’s St Andrews Agreement.

The other two ministries it selected were regional development and agriculture.

The DUP chose to take finance, economy, environment and culture. It said that it would be rotating its ministers but Peter Robinson, the deputy leader, is expected to take finance first.

The Ulster Unionists chose the health portfolio and also took the last available post of employment and learning.

The sole portfolio of the nationalist Social and Democratic Labour Party in the Executive will be social development.

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