GERRY ADAMS and Martin McGuinness have quit the Provisional IRA’s ruling army council, Michael McDowell, the Irish Justice Minister, said yesterday.

Mr McDowell, who broke with the London-Dublin protocol of recent years by “outing” both men as IRA leaders after the Northern Bank raid in December, said that Martin Ferris, a Sinn Fein TD, or member of the Irish Parliament, had also left the army council.

He spoke as Tony Blair said that the IRA could not be compared to al-Qaeda terrorists because he did not think “the IRA would ever have set about trying to kill 3,000 people”. In 30 years about 3,600 people died in Ulster, nearly half of them killed by the Provisional IRA.

But Mr Blair said that the scale of al-Qaeda’s slaughter of innocents “without limit” set it and the IRA apart.

Mr McDowell’s claim that Sinn Fein’s leaders had left the IRA leadership body in Belfast came as speculation grew that an IRA statement might be made later today. Asked if Mr Adams, president of Sinn Fein, Mr McGuinness, its chief negotiator, and Mr Ferris had all given up their alleged membership of the army council, he said: “That’s my understanding.”

Mr McGuinness and party colleague Rita O’Hare fly to the US today to tell politicians and supporters of the political situation in Ulster. Their visit is expected to include stops in Washington and New York, raising speculation that the IRA will shortly make a statement on its future plans.

Mr Adams has always denied being an IRA member. It is alleged that he joined the organisation soon after it split from the Official IRA in 1970 and was its chief-of-staff from 1977 until arrested a year later after the La Mon bombing, when 12 people died at the Irish Collie Club annual dinner. Mr McGuinness is said to have replaced Mr Adams as chief-of-staff and remained in place until 1982. Both men are said to have been part of the seven-member army council ever since. In 1984 police caught Mr Ferris trying to smuggle a shipload of weapons from Boston to Ireland. He spent eight years in prison.

They have been replaced by men loyal to the Adams leadership, sources said. But Mr McDowell said: “I don’t think that by itself [their departure from the army council] amounts to a severance between the two organisations. It’s an acknowledgement, in my view, that there was a very structured link between them in the past.”

With the British and Irish Governments hoping to hear that the IRA will declare an end to all violence and empty its arms dumps, he said that actions and not words were all that mattered now.

“The IRA needs to mutate to an extent that it’s no longer an unlawful organisation,” he said.

Mr McDowell said that there could be no partial IRA disarmament. A weapons gesture is expected to coincide with the statement. “There is no position whatsoever between being armed and being unarmed for the IRA,” he said.

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