Such decisions will be far reaching and difficult. But you never lacked courage in the past. Your courage is now needed for the future.

In the past I have defended the right of the IRA to engage in armed struggle. I did so because there was no alternative for those who would not bend the knee, or turn a blind eye to oppression, or for those who wanted a national republic.

The Irish Republican Army has kept every commitment made by its leadership.

The way forward is by building political support for republican and democratic objectives across Ireland and by winning support for these goals internationally.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.

One of the things I said was that I had been in great hopes that I would become a better person as a result of confronting my own mortality, but it actually never happened. I didn't become a better person.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

For one, as I've written before, the death penalty is plainly unjust. When the number of wrongful convictions and death penalty cases that are eventually exonerated number in the hundreds, if not thousands, we can not call it a moral system.