Dominic McGlinchey
Template:Short description Template:Protection padlock Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use Hiberno-English Template:Infobox military person Dominic McGlinchey (1954 – 10 February 1994) was an Irish republican paramilitary leader and chief of staff of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in the early 1980s. Known for his role in cross-border bombings and assassinations during the Troubles, he was nicknamed "Mad Dog" by the press. He was imprisoned multiple times and survived an assassination attempt before being shot dead in 1994. His legacy remains divisive, with portrayals in Irish fiction, music, and political commentary.
Background
The IRA's last campaign in Northern Ireland, called off in 1962, failed to make an impact on either the government or nationalist consciousness. This failure contributed to the organisation's gradual shift toward Marxist politics.Template:Sfn Since Northern Ireland's creation in 1922, the Catholic minority had experienced varying degrees of discrimination from the Protestant and Unionist majority.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn By the mid-1960s, a growing popular and peaceful campaign emerged to demand civil rights for Catholics. The Northern Ireland government accused the campaign of being a front for republicanism and communism, and indeed, the IRA had infiltrated it from its foundation.Template:Sfn Within a few years, tensions between the two communities escalated into violence, and the IRA sought to position itself as the defender of the Catholic population.Template:Sfn
In 1969, the IRA split into two factions: the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA. The Officials declared a ceasefire in 1972 and embraced non-violent civil agitation, while the Provisionals intensified their armed campaign against British forces.Template:Sfn In 1974, the Officials expelled Seamus Costello, their Operations Officer, for what they termed "factional activity". Costello, dissatisfied with the leadership's rejection of armed struggle,Template:Sfn went on to found a new organisation that would combine the Provisionals’ militancy with the Marxist politics of the Officials.Template:Sfn
The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and its political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), were founded on 8 December 1974 at the Spa Hotel in Lucan, Dublin.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn According to journalist Liam Clarke, the Officials made a "determined effort to strangle the breakaway INLA at birth".Template:Sfn A bloody feud soon broke out between the groups in Belfast, resulting in six deaths.Template:Sfn Costello had fought in the Border campaign in south County Londonderry, and his reputation still carried weight in the area. As Holland and McDonald note, his new organisation had no difficulty attracting recruits from the Officials — by 1977, nearly the entire Official IRA membership in the area had joined the INLA.Template:Sfn
Founder members included Jimmy Brown, Tom McCartan, Gino Gallagher, Dessie O’Hare, and Gerard "Dr Death" Steenson — most of whom would later fight alongside or against McGlinchey over the following decade.Template:Sfn
Early life
Dominic McGlinchey was born in 1954,Template:Sfn in the family home in Ballyscullion Road, Bellaghy,Template:Sfn in rural south County Londonderry.Template:Sfn He was the third of eleven children in a staunchly republican family.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn His father owned a garage; some of his father's police customers would later die at McGlinchey's hands.Template:Sfn His mother MonicaTemplate:Sfn was a devout Catholic.Template:Sfn McGlinchey had seven brothers and four sisters.Template:Sfn Educated at the local school,Template:Sfn he was a bright child, although not outstandingly so, classmates later said.Template:Sfn When he was 16Template:Sfn he began an apprenticeshipTemplate:Sfn in his father's garage.Template:Sfn About this time he was joining the numerous civil rights marches that were taking place in the county. His precise reasons for doing so are unclear, but Dillon speculates that "he was reacting to events around him and the idea of participating in marches offered glamour and a close identification with his own community".Template:Sfn
Internment and Irish republicanism
{{#invoke:Infobox|infobox}}Template:Template other In August 1971 the British army launched Operation Demetrius, which involved the mass arrest and of 342 people suspected of being involved with the IRA.Template:Sfn McGlinchey was one of those interned as a result,Template:SfnTemplate:Refn interrupting his fledgeling career as a car mechanic.Template:Sfn He spent five days being interrogated in Shackleton Barracks;Template:Refn like his fellow internees, he had no access to either family or legal representation.Template:Sfn He was then transferred to Magilligan Prison, and later Long Kesh.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn There he met IRA veterans from the Border campaign, some of whom ran classes in left-wing politics—based on the writings of Marx and James Connolly—as well as military tactics. One man imprisoned with McGlinchey later recalled him as "a big kid out of his depth" who possessed only a limited knowledge of republican history and ideology.Template:Sfn
Released in either May or June 1972, McGlinchey's experience appears to have been the catalyst for him to join the physical force movement.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Coming from a deeply republican area—the failed Border Campaign still a fresh memoryTemplate:Sfn—his background gave him "first-class" republican credentials.Template:Sfn For those intending to follow such a path, there was still a choice to be had between joining the Official or the Provisional IRAs;Template:Refn McGlinchey chose neither. Instead, he joined with Francis Hughes—a childhood friendTemplate:Sfn—Ian Milne and Tom McElwee, and together they formed their own informal unit.Template:Sfn McGlinchey later explained their rationale for doing so during what he called "that colourful period": "You meet fellows who now say they had a political philosophy but they had not. You just went out and did it. When I was doing that at the start. I had no idea I was reacting against the State."Template:Sfn
The choice of McGlinchey and Hughes to join the ProvisionalsTemplate:Sfn was probably, Dillon speculates, based on its local image. Particularly in the clubs and bars McGlinchey frequented, "young Provisionals quickly acquired a hero-worship status", and the movement was rooted in the same romantic nationalism that he had grown up with.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Having joined the IRA's South Derry Brigade, he almost immediately went on the run.Template:Sfn Often going south for days or weeks at a time,Template:Sfn he was able to avoid immediate re-internment.Template:Sfn His training, McGlinchey said, was rudimentary, later stating: "I just picked it up as I went along".Template:Sfn Although he occasionally attended IRA training camps with Hughes—who showed an innate aptitude for marksmanship—McGlinchey's skills were in organising and logistics.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey was arrested in 1973 for possession of guns, for which he received 18 months imprisonment.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Back in Long Kesh, he recommenced his studies in politics and history. This time the class leaders were not old Border campaigners, but relatively young Provisionals.Template:Sfn During the period of his incarceration, the external leadership were in secret negotiations with the British government and was considering a ceasefire. McGlinchey did not approve, telling Hughes that he felt that there was an element within the Army Council that was insufficiently committed to the armed struggle.Template:Sfn
IRA career
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On his release from Long Kesh McGlinchey was appointed "Double O"Template:Sfn—Operations Officer—for the region,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn and lived on the run for the next three years.Template:Sfn This promotion, says Dillon, now allowed him to select his own targets. Reuniting with Hughes and the others, he told them that he would not become an "armchair general" and would continue to take part in their operations.Template:Sfn They carried out frequent and brutalTemplate:Sfn attacks on the British Army. Their activities, says the author Tim Pat Coogan, became the stuff of legend.Template:Sfn Such was their impact, says David Beresford in his book Ten Men Dead—giving the example of their murders of Constables John McCracken and Keneth Sheehan in Magherafelt on 8 April 1977Template:Refn—that the Royal Ulster Constabulary issued wanted posters of McGlinchey and the others. These posters—described by later writers as "an unprecedented step"Template:Sfn and "a desperate attempt to elicit public support"Template:Sfn—listed at length the bombings, shootings and deaths the men were wanted for.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Template:Quote box According to McGlinchey, the trio expanded their theatre of operations—"we didn't confine ourselves to South Derry", he said—after the IRA's failed 1974 ceasefire. Their activities included bombing barracks (for example, Magherafelt and Toomebridge), towns (including Kilrea, Maghera and Ballymena), as well as killing RUC and UDR men.Template:Sfn He particularly favoured those of the latter who lived in isolated, exposed houses, as this made them particularly vulnerable. The towns and police stations he targeted were always in strongly nationalist towns, as he felt that not only would the operation be popular but they would have good escape routes.Template:Sfn McGlinchey later calculated that this amounted to over 200 operationsTemplate:Sfn over "an intricate maze of fields, lanes, country roads and ditches with which they were intimately familiar".Template:Sfn They knew where to hide, how to escape, and who was sympathetic to them; the latter provided them not only with food and drink but intelligence on police and army movements.Template:Sfn On one occasion in 1977, McGlinchey evaded the RUC in Randalstown, Antrim—three members of which he had just shot at—with the help of a friendly fisherman who hijacked a motorboat and ferried him across Lough Neagh to Tyrone and his escape.Template:Sfn The author Ed Moloney interviewed an anonymous IRA man from the time who described McGlinchey's gang, as well as relations between them and the IRA leadership of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams.Template:Sfn
Dominic McGlinchey, Frank Hughes, and their gang were in Donegal hiding out for a while. They looked like mujahideen, longhaired, scruffy, heavily armed, driving wrecks of cars. They were fed up staying in cow barns when they heard Adams and McGuinness were on holiday in the area. They found out where Adams was staying and turned up at his chalet, where they were sniffily shown the door. There was no way Gerry and ColetteTemplate:Refn would let that crowd darken their door. So then they went to where McGuinness was staying. He was annoyed and cursed them up and down, but he let them in and allowed them to stay.Template:Sfn
In June 1973, McGlinchey's unit left a car bomb in Coleraine; six people were killed. McGlinchey was also active in internal security, particularly hunting down those he believed to be assisting the security forces. His victims included a caterer from Derry City who was employed at Fort George British Army base.Template:Sfn In March 1977 McGlinchey was allegedly part of a gang that killed 67-year-old Hester McMullan, a retired postmistress, in Toomebridge. They had already shot and wounded her son, an RUC reservist, and she died when they then fired on her house. The IRA claimed the attack.Template:Sfn A later commentator described how "the woman had been riddled with bullets during an attack on her house in the early hours of the morning, and other members of her family had narrowly escaped".Template:Sfn The SAS placed patrols to intercept McGlinchey in areas their intelligence expected him to be in the north, especially along the border. On one such occasion, believing him to be drinking in a specific bar, they raided the house, firing into the ceiling. The SAS reasoned that the patrons would throw themselves to the floor—all except McGlinchey, whom they expected to reach for a weapon and return fire. However, their intelligence was erroneous; McGlinchey was elsewhere.Template:Sfn
Under McGlinchey's leadership, his area became one of the most dangerous areas of Northern Ireland for the security forces. This brought him into confrontation with the IRA leadership, to whom he regularly complained about the quality of his men's equipment ("units in South Armagh had 'better gear' than his teams", he moaned). His repeated requests for more and more powerful arms were denied.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn For an 18-month period between 1976 and 1977, McGlinchey's unit often cooperated with that of the local INLA, their volunteers often taking part in each other's operations.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn However, by the spring of 1977 the INLA in the region had suffered a number of damaging arrests.Template:Sfn To avoid losing the IRA's best operatives to a similar fate, McGuinness ordered McGlinchey, Hughes and Milne to go to New York and stay for a while with sympathisers.Template:Sfn This may also have been a form of exile due to their indiscipline and over-enthusiasm, as McGuinness was rarely able to control them.Template:Sfn He also knew that their capture "would have been a major propaganda coup for the authorities". McGlinchey's stay was a lively one; while there, they were wrongly accused of a robbery, which had been committed by an Irish republican fundraiser.Template:Refn McGlinchey wanted to kill the man but was persuaded against it. The three men returned to Ireland soon after this episode.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
In 1977, following a mailvan robbery,Template:Sfn McGlinchey was arrested in County MonaghanTemplate:Sfn for carjacking a Garda patrol vehicle and threatening the officer with a pistol,Template:SfnTemplate:Refn although McGlinchey claimed that the gun was actually a wheelbrace.Template:Sfn He failed to make bail at Dublin's Special Criminal Court after a Garda Superintendent argued that McGlinchey would fail to attend court if bailed.Template:Sfn McGlinchey was convicted and sent to the Republic of Ireland's maximum-security Portlaoise Prison. In the north, Hughes and Milne carried on as usual, but some veteran republicans, says Dillon, believed that they had lost an experienced advisor,Template:Sfn and following the loss of Hughes, writes the ex-Provisional and lawyer Kieran Hughes, "south Derry was never the same after the break-up of the unit centred on Francis Hughes and Dominic McGlinchey".Template:Sfn
During McGlinchey's incarceration, suggests Dillon, he reconsidered his role as an operator. McGlinchey, he says, was aware that the amount of attention he would attract on his release would constrain his freedom of action and possibly endanger those he fought alongside. He may also have been warned by the IRA leadership that, for the same reason, he would be unable to return to a commanding role.Template:Sfn Consequentially he appears to have considered looking for a new role in Sinn Féin, probably to provide him with cover while organising overall strategy. But, says Dillon, "the more McGlinchey considered the option of a political role, the less he was enamoured of the idea". He suspected he would dislike taking orders from a Sinn Féin manager, and even more so from one that "had never pulled a trigger".Template:Sfn An anonymous ex-volunteer told Dillon that "the prospect of being an armchair general didn't much appeal to [McGlinchey], considering the fact that he hated armchair generals".Template:Sfn
Breakdown of relations with IRA
Towards the end of his term, McGlinchey fell out with the IRA's prison leadership, particularly with the ex-Vice President of Sinn Féin, Dáithí Ó Conaill,Template:Sfn and the Dublin leadership generally,Template:Refn whom he called "armchair generals". As McGlinchey saw it, they were "sitting in the relative security of Dublin while he and Hughes were out shooting up the countryside of South Derry".Template:Sfn The confrontation almost turned physical. Dillon's source told him that McGlinchey "was not a man to back down—that was his nature. There was a rumour that he told O'Connell [Dáithí Ó Conaill] he was nothing but a fucking schoolteacher and an armchair general". This was ill-advised, says the source, as the other IRA prisoners in Portlaoise admired Ó Conaill as a "hero and intellectual".Template:Sfn
As a result, McGlinchey and the Provisional IRA parted company, and he joined the INLA.Template:Sfn Whose decision this was, remains unclear. The IRA leadership said they expelled McGlinchey from the republican wing for indiscipline;Template:Sfn McGlinchey, in turn, claimed the Provisionals "had become too soft".Template:Sfn A volunteer who was inside with McGlinchey at the time later recalled how vague the information was: "They say that when he was in Portlaoise that he left the Provos and went to the INLA. The Provos say that he couldn't take orders, he wanted to be the big guy, so they threw him out, court-martialled him...some would say there was other stuff involved."Template:SfnTemplate:Refn While imprisoned, McGlinchey had begun to develop his political understanding of Irish Republicanism and political philosophy, reading among other, writings by James Connolly,Template:Sfn Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Che GuevaraTemplate:Sfn and the Belgian Marxist Ernst Mandel. The prisoners frequently indulged in political discussions, which expanded McGlinchey's political understanding. The development of McGlinchey's own political radicalismTemplate:Sfn may also have contributed to a decision of his to leave the IRA.Template:Sfn Whatever its origins, contemporaries believed his joining the INLA was firmly encouraged by his wife.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey maintained regular contact with the outside,Template:Refn and was particularly keen to recruit the last INLA chief of staff—but who had since left the group—back into the organisation.Template:Sfn This individual—whose identity remains unknown—seriously considered the offer, but ultimately declined.Template:Sfn The reporter Gavin Esler suggests that McGlinchey may have taken a number of disaffected Provisionals from the border region with him to the INLA.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
Move to the INLA
Following McGlinchey's move to the INLA, says Coogan, "the subsequent history of the movement is appalling".Template:Sfn His defection was a "bitter blow" to McGuinness, say the latter's biographers, as he and McGlinchey had become close friends.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn But the INLA, argues Dillon, was the only armed group at the time "capable of providing McGlinchey with the action he craved", and for his part, McGlinchey's reputation preceded him.Template:Sfn He was released from Portlaoise in 1982, having nearly served five years,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn and made an "immediate impact" on his new organisation.Template:Sfn Immediately appointed to the General Headquarters Staff on release,Template:Sfn he was soon given the post of director of operations,Template:Sfn while a now-unknown Belfast man was appointed chief of staff in July.Template:Sfn
Within a short time of his release, McGlinchey had moved his family from Bellaghy to Dundalk.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Refn Here he was better situated to organise INLA operations in the Armagh-Newry-Tyrone-South Derry-South West Antrim area.Template:Sfn McGlinchey recruited both disaffected Provisionals and new people,Template:Sfn and (ruthlessly)Template:Sfn put an end to the group's intermittent internal feuding.Template:Sfn Anne Dolan, writing in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, suggests that this was one of the reasons he had been recruited by the INLA in the first place.Template:Sfn One of his first actions in office was to contact McGuinness in Derry and attempt a rapprochement. This he saw as having—in terms of exchanging intelligence, for example—advantages for both groups.Template:Sfn He still respected McGuinness and when they met, McGlinchey assured him that he would not be against joint operations.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
McGlinchey began his INLA career "orchestrat[ing] a sustained bombing campaign"Template:Sfn against Unionist leaders with a swathe of—albeit unsuccessful—bomb attacks on their homes and offices.Template:Refn Not only did the INLA fail to hit any of its designated targets, but a number of their operations killed Catholic children, with three dying in Belfast as a result of INLA explosions in a five-month period. These were propaganda disasters for McGlinchey, and, say Holland and McDonald, "gave the INLA a reputation for recklessness".Template:Sfn On the political front, The Times reported in May 1983 that the IRSP was considering standing McGlinchey in the East Londonderry constituency for the recently called election.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Meanwhile, on McGlinchey's command, the INLA killed Jim Flynn—thought to have been responsible for assassinating Costello—in Dublin in June 1982.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Chief of staff
By June 1983 the INLA chief of staff, McGlinchey's Belfast man, had become unpopular with a number of important figures in the group after a bar-room argument turned ugly. At an Army Council meeting in Ardee held later that month, the Belfast man was sidelined and McGlinchey was elected.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn This may not have been to his choice; he was later described by those he fought with as someone who would rather rule through proxies than do so directly himself.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn By now the organisation was on the brink of disintegration. It had been badly hit by the supergrass Harry Kirkpatrick, with many of its best men imprisoned on his statements, and paranoia and internal suspicion were rife as a result. Jack Holland and Henry McDonald comment on the INLA's situation in the early- to mid-1980s:Template:Sfn
When the INLA seemed on the verge of collapse, it defied all predictions. Instead of breaking apart, it actually raised its violent campaign to levels of bloodshed and horror never equalled before or since in the organisation's history. One of the reasons it was able to do so was the rise to power of a man who became known throughout Ireland as "Mad Dog" McGlinchey.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey introduced the policy of "direct military rule" (DMR) which mandated a policy of execution for all crimes by the group's members and brought the headquarters under the direct control of the chief of staff.Template:Sfn McGlinchey was now able to act without reference to the rest of the organisation when he chose.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Dolan describes him as "unleash[ing] a reign of personal terror over the undisciplined organisation; opponents and suspected informers were ruthlessly purged",Template:Sfn while the Lost Lives team comment that "in practice, [DMR] appeared to give him licence to carry out shootings without reference to the rest of the organisation".Template:Sfn As a result of the free licence this policy gave McGlinchey, tensions heightened with other republicans, particularly in South Armagh.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
McGlinchey, says Dillon, "soon discovered that it was not an easy task to control some of the men under his command or to prevent what he termed 'botched operations'".Template:Sfn Following a series of counter-productive actions in Belfast,Template:Refn McGlinchey refocussed on the rural areas, whose commanders he told to "pull their weight".Template:Sfn
Droppin Well bombing
{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} Template:Quote box Following McGlinchey's criticism of the Derry Brigade's lack of activity, they devised a plan that met with his approval.Template:Sfn The target was the Droppin Well bar in Ballykelly, where, McGlinchey was advised, soldiers from the army base regularly drank. McGlinchey instructed them to proceed with the bombingTemplate:Sfn and to ensure maximum casualties. He knew, but ignored, the near-inevitability of civilian deaths.Template:Sfn On 6 December 1982Template:Sfn 17 people—11 soldiers of the Cheshire RegimentTemplate:Sfn and six civilians—were killed after a timebomb exploded in the middle of a disco. This brought the roof of the pub in.Template:Sfn To McGlinchey, they—whether Protestant or Catholic—were fraternising with the enemy.Template:Sfn Four of the dead were women;Template:Sfn the INLA's subsequent claim of responsibility described them and the other injured women as "consorts".Template:Sfn Although McGlinchey later claimed that the bar owner had received multiple warnings against serving soldiers, it is unlikely that any such warnings were given.Template:Sfn
Following the Droppin Well bombing, McGlinchey became a "hate figure":Template:Sfn DUP MP Willie McRea called for the destruction of "this insane devilish brat McGlinchey" in the House of Commons, calling him a "well-known mass-murderer",Template:Sfn while Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald told the Oireachtas that the bombing was a "blasphemous sectarian act". McGlinchey, already a "prime target" for British intelligence, was now called the "most wanted man in Ireland".Template:Sfn The British Government had been attempting to persuade that of the Republic to extradite republicans to face justice in the North for many years, with no success. The Ballykelly bombing encouraged the Irish court to reconsider its position:Template:Sfn the following day, Ireland's Supreme Court ordered McGlinchey to be extradited to Belfast in response to an earlier RUC request for McGlinchey to be returned to them to face trial for the murder of Hester McMullan.Template:Refn This was despite the INLA being still a legal organisation at that point and McGlinchey himselfTemplate:Sfn—having already absconded from bail while in the northTemplate:Sfn—being on the run and unobtainable.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
The court's decision was a dramatic break with precedent, and a controversial one, as the Republic objected to the use of Diplock courts in the north; it had rejected 48 similar applications from the north since 1970; this was the first such extradition since the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Despite, says law professor Brice Dickson, the Republic of Ireland operating the juryless Special Criminal Courts in Dublin and being openly critical of the northern legal system.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn There were also concerns that Irish people were the subject of miscarriages of justice in mainland Britain.Template:Sfn The Leader of the Opposition, Charles Haughey, for example, opined that
In view of the serious doubts I have about the fairness of the trial they would get in British courts, anybody accused of these [so-called political] crimes should be dealt with before our courts so that we know at least they would get a scrupulously fair trial.Template:Sfn
Legal scholarship was divided. Patrick Keatinge argues that "given the long-standing political and legal inhibitions regarding extradition", that of McGlinchey was "bound to be controversial in Ireland, however much it was welcomed by the British government".Template:Sfn The legal scholar B. W. Warner, suggests that by now "the climate of opinion towards the bombers and gunmen had grown hostile", while The Economist expressed the opinion that the extradition "offers some hope of less bitterness" between north and south.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn McGlinchey, in absentia, fought the decision.Template:Sfn Although he rejected accusations of involvement in the murder, he claimed—in the words of the Extradition Act of 1965—that the Toomebridge operation had been "a political offence or an offence connected with a political offence".Template:Sfn Through his solicitors, McGlinchey presented evidence of his IRA active service at the time in the form of wanted posters, charge sheets and articles naming him in the Ballymena Guardian. This was not accepted, and McGinchley re-approached his challenge, this time basing it on the clause of the Act which prevented extradition if there were grounds for believing that, following transfer the individual would then in any case still be prosecuted for political offences.Template:Sfn In a two-hour hearing, Chief Justice Tom O'Higgins rejected this claim also.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
He recorded the court's opinion that "modern terrorist violence...is often the antithesis of what could reasonably be regarded as political, either in itself or in its connections".Template:Sfn Higgins also declared that whether the victim of the alleged political offence—in McGlinchey's case, Hester —was killed or not was irrelevant to the question; the important point, he stressed, was that she was a civilian.Template:Sfn "An elderly grandmother riddled with bullets", he continued, was in no way what "reasonable civilised people would regard as political activity".Template:Sfn Public interest in McGlinchey's extradition subsided following the judgement, as, notes the jurist Alpha Connelly, he "did not oblige the Irish authorities by presenting himself to them for the purpose of extradition pursuant to the Supreme Court judgement".Template:Sfn
Internal security
McGlinchey only ever crossed the border into Northern Ireland when an operation required it, which made it harder for the security services to maintain effective surveillance.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn In spite of secret surveillance south of the border,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn the Special Reconnaissance UnitTemplate:Refn had difficulty monitoring McGlinchey, argues the journalist Peter Taylor. As a result, they "did the next best thing and latched on to an INLA associate", Seamus Grew.Template:Sfn Grew was a close friend of Mary McGlinchey.Template:Sfn By tailing Grew north of the border, the SRU hoped to be led to McGlinchey.Template:Sfn The RUC's intelligence arm, E4A, believing him to be in Armagh, thought they knew the route he would be taking back to the south.Template:Sfn Six days after the Droppin Well bombing, Grew and another INLA member Roderick "Roddy" Carroll, were shot dead at an RUC checkpoint while driving through Mullacreevie.Template:Sfn McGlinchey—the intended targetTemplate:Sfn—had been seen getting into their car in the south by The Det surveillance. He was believed to be bringing a bag of gunsTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn into the north.Template:Sfn This was not the case;Template:SfnTemplate:Refn the handbrake was on,Template:Sfn and neither were Grew or Carroll armed.Template:Sfn It seems probable that he had been in the vehicle a few minutes earlier, but had alighted before reaching the roadblock,Template:Sfn with what the Belfast priest and peace activist Fra Raymond Murray has called an "instinctive intuition".Template:Sfn Dillon posits that the army had a shoot-to-kill policy with regard to McGlinchey, believing him to be always heavily armed and unlikely to surrender without a fight.Template:Sfn
The deaths of Grew and Carroll reinforced McGlinchey's conviction that there was a mole in the organisation with the sole intention of "setting up McGlinchey".Template:Sfn Six months after Grew and Carroll were killed, McGlinchey believed he had found the source of E4A's information:Template:Sfn Eric Dale, he believed, had provided the RUC with the information they required to locate Grew and Carroll.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
On the evening of 3 May 1983, McGlinchey personally led the gang who kidnapped Dale in front of his girlfriend, Claire McMahon, in Monaghan. She later said that the men originally said they wanted to speak to Dale "about guns or something that was missing".Template:Sfn McGlinchey's role in the operation was to keep McMahon calm in the front room while other gang members interrogated Dale in the hallway.Template:Sfn Mary McGlinchey was part of this team.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn McMahon later said that the only time she saw her partner again he was lying face-down on the floor surrounded by six people with guns.Template:Sfn Dillon describes McGlinchey's appearance that night:
McGlinchey's balaclava had slits for his eyes and stretched below his chin; he wore a combat jacket, and a shoulder holster resting on his chest contained a .44 magnum revolver. His right hand was positioned near the gun butt and his left held the holster.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey told Claire that Dale would be returned to her shortly, and then emptied McMahon's car boot and bundled Dale into it. McGlinchey told her that if she had not heard from Dale by morning, she was to make her way to Culloville for information; McMahon, realising that the gang were going to steal her car as well, asked how she was expected to travel from Monaghan to South Armagh without a vehicle. She was not to see Dale again; his body was found four days later outside Killean. An INLA statement claimed that he had been executed for—among other things—trying to establish the whereabouts of "an alleged INLA man wanted on both sides of the border". This was an indirect reference to McGlinchey himself.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn As the Dale case illustrates, McGlinchey occasionally tortured his victims, often "with the aid of instruments such as a red-hot poker", says Coogan,Template:Sfn often using Tom McCartan, a "quick-tempered and violent man", for such work.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey's efforts in counterintelligence did not stand in the way of the armed campaign. In May 1983 both McGlincheys, with two other men,Template:Sfn took part in a drive by gun attack on a Cookstown checkpoint, him with a machine gun and her using a pistol.Template:Sfn A police constable reservist, Colin Carson, was killed and fire was exchanged between those in the van and the RUC in a sangar.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's fingerprints were later found in the van.Template:Sfn The operation, said the UPI at the time, was claimed by the IRA's Tyrone Brigade as their responsibility,Template:Sfn although it is generally considered to have been carried out by McGlinchey's group.Template:Sfn
Money and weapons were essential for the INLA's campaign, and McGlinchey—by now accompanied by Dessie O'HareTemplate:Sfn—organised a number of bank and Securicor robberies, on one occasion stealing £100,000 in a single raid. This allowed tentative plans to buy arms from the United States to be put into effect, although, in the event, the plan came to nothing.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Another two robberies in Cork brought the group £300,000 between them.Template:Sfn Another favourite fundraising technique was fraud, one case of which was meant to have netted the group £140,000 in stolen bankers' orders. However, Éamon McMahon from South Armagh, whose job it was to cash the orders, paid nothing.Template:Sfn McMahon was an associate of Patrick Mackin—with whom McGlinchey was involved in a personal feudTemplate:Sfn—and, to resolve the issue, both men agreed to meet Mary McGlinchey in the Imperial Hotel in Dundalk. Trusting her, suggest Holland and McDonald, "was a fatal mistake":Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Mary had lured them there for her husband to kill.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
British intelligence also continued its attempts to capture McGlinchey. One extreme tactic,Template:Sfn allegedly used in October 1983, was described by The Guardian as "badly botched".Template:Sfn A fake tour operator called Caruso, under cover of an address in London's Albemarle Street, wrote to Tony and Margaret Hayde in September informing them that they had won third-prize in a competition, an all-expenses-paid week in Torremilenos. The Haydes were founder members of the IRSP, and The Times reported that "the couple, who admit to having met Dominic McGlinchey, allegedly INLA chief of staff and Ireland's most wanted man, say they were offered immediate cash and the promise of a further £10,000 in return for information".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
By the end of 1983, relations with the Derry IRA had become fraught. The IRA had publicly condemned an INLA no-warning carbomb, and a number of IRA men had equally publicly left the organisation for the INLA. Matters came to a head in early December when an INLA man was accused of stealing an IRA gun, to which he retaliated by threatening senior Derry republicans. McGuinness, in an attempt to forestall a feud, contacted McGlinchey—both men had stayed in contact after McGlinchey had left—for assistance. McGlinchey met his man in Dundalk and instructed him to return the gun, in exchange for assurances as to the volunteer's safety.Template:Sfn In an attempt to restore the peace, in a December 1983 interview with the Starry Plough, McGlinchey supported Sinn Féin's decision to increase its political involvement in the Republic and called for greater cooperation in the north between the two groups.Template:Sfn
INLA violence continued alongside fundraising ventures and personal vendettas, although often unsuccessfully. For example, two operations had been planned for 13 August 1983. An RUC reservist was to be killed at a checkpoint in Markethill, while in Dungannon the police station was to be shot up. Both attempts were failures. At Markethill the unit failed to kill any police, while in Dungannon the INLA unit was ambushed and two volunteers shot dead.Template:Sfn At the debriefing of the surviving volunteers, an attendee later recalled, McGlinchey "went mad and called us all stupid cunts".Template:Sfn McGlinchey was also concerned about the loyalty of certain members of his Belfast Brigade, a number of whom were summoned to the Ardee farmhouse in late October 1983.Template:Sfn Also kidnapped and brought to Ardee at the same time was ex-INLA member Gerard "Sparky" Barkley, who had been a close friend of Kirkpatrick. Although Barkley had publicly left the organisation, McGlinchey suspected him to be robbing banks with INLA weapons but not paying over anything to his old comrades as would be expected. Barkley swore that he was now merely an "ODC", or ordinary decent criminal.Template:Sfn He was not believed. Following interrogation, Barkley was shot on McGlinchey's orders by either Paul "Bonanza" McCannTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn or Mary McGlinchey.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
Darkley massacre
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On 21 November 1983 two armed men walked into the Pentecostal Church in Darkley, South Armagh. They opened fire on the congregation, who were singing "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?",Template:Sfn and shot a number of worshippers, three of whom died with many more injured. A previously unknown group calling itself the Catholic Reaction Force soon claimed responsibility for the killings,Template:Sfn which it called a "token retaliation".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn The RUC confirmed that weaponry used in previous INLA operations had been used.Template:Sfn The INLA, however, denied involvement and condemned the attack,Template:Refn although McGlinchey later acknowledged the presence of an INLA volunteer in the group to whom, McGlinchey admitted, he had loaned a Ruger rifle.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn McGlinchey expressed dismay at the attackTemplate:Sfn and seems to have been unaware it was to take place, but notwithstanding this, the political damage was done and his name was now linked firmly to violent sectarianism. The attack had been the idea of a Belfast INLA man as revenge for the death of his brother at the hands of loyalists; he told McGlinchey that he wanted weapons to target a known UVF man.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey quickly acted to put distance between himself and the Darkley massacre.Template:Sfn Referring to the reason for the attack he had originally been given, he claimed that the INLA man, following the death of his brother, involved "must have been unbalanced or something to have organised this killing".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn In an interview with the IRSP's newspaper, The Starry Plough, he stated of the Darkley killings: "I condemn them. Those people were only hillbilly folk who had done no harm to anyone. They are in no way a legitimate target. These killings are contrary to republican socialism. They cannot be defended."Template:Sfn Coogan also suggests that the man who planned the attack was "clearly deranged".Template:Sfn The Irish anthropologist S. Bruce argues that McGlinchey's approach can "reasonably" be inferred to have been that "if Protestants get caught in the cross-fire, they deserve it".Template:Sfn
Darkley was yet another propaganda disaster for the INLA, and whether McGlinchey liked it or not, symbolised what it was best known for.Template:Sfn The murders heightened McGlinchey's profile further, and, argue Holland and McDonald, for much of 1983 "Ireland and Britain were gripped by 'Mad Dog' fever". McGlinchey—still on the run—was reportedly spotted all over the island.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's tactics for evading capture, the Gardaí later reported, included never staying in the one place too long and frequently disguising his appearance.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn On one occasion, claimed The Guardian, his disguise was good enough to enable him to attend his sister's wedding "and that not even those standing in the church during the ceremony realised that he was there".Template:Sfn
Sunday Tribune interview
Six days after the Darkley attack, McGlinchey gave an interview to the Sunday Tribune, conducted by its editor, Vincent Browne.Template:Refn Browne said that the public had a right to know about McGlinchey,Template:Sfn and McGlinchey was keen to put his side of the story across, as by now the IRA had also condemned Darkley as purely sectarian.Template:Refn He appears to have offered the BBC the opportunity to interview him first, but they declined. Browne and McGlinchey talked for four hours, only being interrupted for occasional refreshment.Template:Sfn Browne later annotated his notes of the interview, describing McGlinchey as speaking "with a soft Derry accent...for the most part, relaxed, composed and fairly articulate". Browne suggested that the term "Mad Dog" seemed misapplied to the man he interviewedTemplate:Sfn although also that "there is a coldness about him in relation to the consequences of his actions which is chilling". Browne realised that McGlinchey was not used to speaking with journalists, as he was "quite devoid of the caution and guile" Browne was usually met with by his subjects. McGlinchey may, Browne said, have been overly tired.Template:Sfn Conversely, Browne noted, the pressure of the situation may have sharpened McGlinchey's wits, for Browne wrote that McGlinchey soon "perked up" and became "unusually well able to carry the drift of an argument through several convolutions". Their conversation shifted from Irish politics to the global; this may have been deliberate on McGlinchey's part to distract from the Darkley attack and questions as to his own role in it.Template:Sfn Browne discussed McGlinchey's preferred tactics on an operation, asking, for example, whether McGlinchey ever saw the face of his victim:
Usually, for I like to get in close, to minimise the risk for myself. It's usually just a matter of who gets in first and by getting in close you put your man down first. It has worked for me down the years. I wouldn't be as good as they are [the security forces] shooting it out over distances because I don't get the opportunity for weapons and target training like they do. So I believe in getting in close'.Template:Sfn
The last time this had happened, added McGlinchey, was "the Cookstown job", referring to the death of Constable Carson in May that year. McGlinchey described how he "went up to the bunker outside the police station and just opened up on the policeman in the bunker".Template:Sfn One of the few times McGlinchey seemed uneasy in the interview, wrote Browne, was when he was asked about the children of McGlinchey's victims, to which he replied in generalities. He also became agitated, saying that he refused to be "blackmailed by the grief of children".Template:Sfn McGlinchey showed no remorse for his activities,Template:Sfn said Browne, only a "frightening indifference".Template:Sfn After the interview was published, the Gardaí visited the Tribune's officesTemplate:Sfn and studied it minutely to extract any clue as to his whereabouts.Template:Sfn In Britain, The Guardian newspaper described McGlinchey's availability for interviewing by anyone he wanted "embarrassing" for the Gardaí at a time when the police were under pressure to capture him.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
Capture
The manhunt for McGlinchey and his gang involved hundreds of soldiers and Gardaí,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn while the media "followed their trail around the Republic in some awe".Template:Sfn A Gardaí patrol eventually discovered him accidentallyTemplate:Sfn in Cork City on 2 December 1983. Far from being a police triumph, the encounter was "one of the more farcical incidents"Template:Sfn among what Dolan calls their "picaresque" manhunt.Template:Sfn Two Gardaí knocked on the door and, receiving no answer, attempted to force an entry.Template:Sfn McGlinchey−with MaryTemplate:Sfn−and comrades were covering them with their guns as the police entered.Template:Sfn A later report suggested that Mary had wanted to kill them, but her husband restrained her.Template:Sfn The republicans made them strip at gunpointTemplate:Sfn—a tactic McGlinchey used a number of times in encounters with the GardaíTemplate:Sfn—and tied them up. The officers took three hours to escape from their bonds, by which time McGlinchey and his gang had stolen a car and escapedTemplate:Sfn with the help of a local man.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's "humiliation" of the Gardaí, says Dillon, "energised" the manhunt.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn It also, suggests Coogan, "inject[ed] something of a Robin Hood element" to republican propaganda, as well as—by making them "peel off" their uniforms—"adding a new definition to the tern 'peeler'".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn The gang were armed with automatic assault rifles, pump-action shotguns and short arms.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey and his gang were eventually captured on his way to meet his children—on which account, he later said, he panicked when he was surroundedTemplate:Sfn—on St Patrick's Day 1984 in County Clare.Template:Refn They holed himself up in the house of John Lyons, a musician; although Lyons was absent, his wife and children were at home, hostages for McGlinchey.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The Gardaí's Security Task ForceTemplate:Sfn—numbering 40 menTemplate:Sfn—did not expect to be able to force his surrender, so they were accompanied by the Irish Army who were equipped with Uzi submachine guns.Template:Sfn As the police drove up to the house, McGlinchey opened fire on the leading vehicle from an upstairs room. Garda Chris Power was hit in the shoulder, and was forced to remain in the car for safety while the firefight took place, even though he was bleeding heavily.Template:Sfn Both sides exchanged shots,Template:Sfn until a priest was sent in to negotiate with McGlincheyTemplate:Sfn from the bottom of the stairs.Template:Sfn At 7:15Template:Nbsppm,Template:Sfn having been wounded,Template:Sfn and to safeguard Mrs Lyons,Template:Sfn and both their children—McGlinchey's were nearby,Template:Sfn in the care of a supporterTemplate:Sfn—he surrendered.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The priest, Father Timothy Tuohy, later told how McGlinchey and his gang wanted him to stay with them as they left the house, expressing fears that they would be assassinated if there were no witnesses.Template:Sfn
Extradition, imprisonment, release and imprisonment
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Following McGlinchey's arrest, he was interrogated in Ennis police station.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn In Dublin, events moved fast. The Supreme Court had already authorised his extradition to the north, and now had to be "hastily convened"Template:Sfn—since it was the evening of a bank holiday—to action it.Template:Sfn This occurred "fairly promptly", noted Gemma Hussey, Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, in her cabinet diary.Template:Sfn There was some uncertainty as to whether McGlinchey would be extradited immediately or be prosecuted in the south for his offences there first.Template:Sfn McGlinchey appealed the decision,Template:Sfn questioning the constitutionality of the 1965 Act. This was rejected ex tempore by the court.Template:Sfn In O'Donnell's words, thanks to the Attorney General Peter Sutherland "and an unprecedented" court sitting, within 18 hours of his arrest in ClareTemplate:Sfn he was transferred to the RUC at the Killeen border checkpoint.Template:Sfn This took place at around 1Template:Nbspam on the morning of 18 March 1984Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn and had been the fastest extradition in Irish history.Template:Sfn It was also the first: no republican had ever been extradited from the Republic to the North.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn McGlinchey appointed a Newry man called "Jap" chief of staff during McGlinchey's enforced absence.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's extradition was criticised in the Republic by those who wished him to face justice first for the crimes he had committed there "before caving in on the important principle of extradition".Template:Sfn The British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Prior, hailed the arrest as "a major victory in the struggle against terrorism",Template:Sfn while the MEP for Northern Ireland, John Taylor called it "the best news to come out of Dublin for many years".Template:Sfn Sinn Féin said the extradition had caused "a sense of treachery and anger" in the Nationalist community; The Economist wrote that, while "the IRA had no love for Mr McGlinchey...it must fear the creation of precedents that could affect its own gunmen".Template:Sfn The largest opposition political party in the Republic, Fianna Fáil, "kept an uneasy silence while some backbenchers protested" against it, while the Taoiseach gave it his "vigorous backing".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
A month after McGlinchey's capture, The Economist suggested that McGlinchey faced "only a single, seven-year-old murder charge, which could be hard to prove".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn While he was on remand, McGlinchey's daughter Maíre died of meningitis. He was released on parole to attend her funeral in Bellaghy.Template:Sfn Nearly six months after his extradition,Template:Sfn McGlinchey appeared in court for the murder of Hester McMullan in December 1984.Template:Sfn Five crown witnesses failed to appear,Template:Sfn but the Crown used McGlinchey's own admissions to the SCC regarding his IRA activity as evidence.Template:Sfn On Christmas EveTemplate:Sfn Justice HuttonTemplate:Sfn sentenced McGlinchey to life imprisonment.Template:Refn Following what Arizona jurist Michael P. P. Simon calls a "controversial and politically sensitive decision",Template:Sfn Coogan says that it then "soon became clear that the Northern authorities had little or no evidence" on which to hold McGlinchey.Template:Sfn He was released by Court of Appeal in Belfast the following year. Lord Justice Gibson found that McGlinchey's previous confession to the Garda regarding his IRA membership did not necessarily mean that he was involved in every action the IRA carried out in the area. Further, Gibson ruled that the fingerprints that had been found on the getaway car could have been placed on the vehicle up to 30-hours after Hester's death. Both McGlinchey's confession to membership, and his fingerprints, said Gibson in a 45-minute judgment, were thus inadmissible as evidence.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
Return to the Republic
Having been the first republican to have been extradited from the south to the north, on 11 October 1985 he also became the first person to be re-extradited from the north back.Template:Sfn The leader of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, later joked in Fortnight magazine that the Catholic Church was insistent that "although reports that Mr McGlinchey was seen to move have been verified by many observers, his movements back and forth across the border do not meet the conditions used to describe a miracle".Template:Sfn McGlinchey was handed back to the Gardaí at the Killeen border crossing, and immediately re-arrested on charges relating to the Clare siege. As well as Gardaí Special Branch armed with Uzis,Template:Sfn McGlinchey was greeted by spectators with placards, note Holland and McDonald. Of these read {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, while another said "Welcome home, Daddy".Template:Sfn By this point, argues Coogan, "the pendulum of public opinion had swung back towards him considerably". His photograph had appeared in the news often enough for the "Mad Dog" image to appear a misnomer, and his wife and young children were photogenic.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey was convicted at the Special Criminal Court in March 1986 for firearms offences from two years earlier.Template:Sfn The presiding judge, Mr Justice MacMahon commented during his sentencing that "it was to his credit" that MvGlinchey had not fired on the Gardaí although having had many opportunities to do so.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn McGlinchey was sent to Portlaoise for 10 years, where he became a model prisoner,Template:Sfn immersing himself in the study of constitutionalTemplate:Sfn and extradition law,Template:Sfn on which he became expert.Template:Sfn As a result, he became an informal advisor to other prisonersTemplate:Sfn and was able to dismiss his barristers and prosecute his own appeals.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn The Supreme Court advised McGlinchey to seek payment of the state aid paid to defence counsel as he was acting on his own behalf.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's appeals failed in Ireland and then also in the European Court of Human Rights.Template:Sfn He then appealed to the Supreme Court again, on the new grounds that the 1981 warrant from Belfast was flawed. Justice Declan Costello initially agreed, noting that the police officer upon whose oath it had been issued had failed to sign it as he should have. However, said Costello, there were sufficient safeguards in the extradition process to have allowed McGlinchey to have presented this evidence on an earlier occasion; he had not done so, and the appeal was therefore dismissed.Template:Sfn Dillon suggests that during this period of imprisonment, McGlinchey reconsidered the direction of his life, resolving to retire from military activity and become a family man.Template:Sfn On the outside, though, McGlinchey was beginning to be seen as a potential leader for a disaffected group of Provisionals from the East Tyrone Brigade.Template:Refn McGlinchey, they knew, "had even less regard for the Adams leadership than the East Tyrone men".Template:Sfn
INLA feuding
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While McGlinchey was in Portlaoise he could not control external events. In December 1985 members of the INLA in the north were released after their convictions in the supergrass trials, including a previous chief of staff, Gerard Steenson. Many of them—already distrustful of each other after Kirkpatrick's many allegationsTemplate:Sfn and the "dirty laundry aired" as a resultTemplate:Sfn—came into conflict with each other as they attempt to retake the positions in the group. Their conflict soon descended into a violent feud, with the INLA effectively splitting into four distinct factions.Template:Sfn The mass-imprisonments following Kirkpatrick's evidence had been extremely damaging for the INLA, and between December 1986 to March 1987 there were 12 deaths—including much of the IRSP and INLA leadership—and many more injuries in an increasingly bloody feud.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Killing of Mary McGlinchey
Mary called "Mrs Mad Dog" by the ex-soldier and writer Ken WhartonTemplate:SfnTemplate:Refn—may have continued to organiseTemplate:Sfn her husband's operation while he was incarcerated, perhaps even running it.Template:Sfn Publicly, she appears to have distanced herself from political activity (notwithstanding, noted The Sunday Tribune, that "her window displayed a Sinn Féin election poster").Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn She probably supported the faction still controlled by her husband's man—"Jap" O'Reilly—in the INLA's faction feuding but not to the extent of playing a direct role.Template:Sfn
On 1 February 1987, at around 9:20Template:Nbsppm, at the family home in Dundalk, she was bathing their two children upstairs when two balaclava-clad menTemplate:Sfn broke into through the back doorTemplate:Sfn and ran upstairs. They fired at Mary with automatic weapons,Template:Sfn shooting her in the face.Template:Sfn Declan, the eldest child, escaped out of the house and raised the neighbours, who found Mary shot, with her head in the bath.Template:Sfn Regional newspaper The Argus later reported that the killing "caused shock waves in the town".Template:Sfn
RTÉ reported the next day that McGlinchey had been asleep in the ground floor block of Portlaoise's E-Wing—which housed, in part, "members and former members of the INLA"Template:Sfn—when prison authorities were informed of his wife's killing.Template:Refn McGlinchey was awakened and moved to another section of the prison, where he was given the news. RTÉ reported that "the prison authorities refused to disclose what his reaction was", that being personal information. When asked whether his move had been because McGlinchey was considered to be in danger among other INLA men, the prison official said it was "prudent and in the best interests of everyone".Template:Sfn The McGlinchey children were taken into care by Brigid Makowski, who had been their legal guardian.Template:Sfn Mary's inquest was delayed for three months as McGlinchey's counsel argued he had only been informed two days earlier and had not had sufficient time to instruct him.Template:Sfn
Holland and McDonald argue that "because [McGlinchey] was the personification of all that happened to the INLA from 1982 to early 1984, those who suffered under his reign blamed McGlinchey personally." Many people—including some republicans—wanted him dead.Template:Sfn She is known to have taken an active part in McGlinchey's activities; the RUC wished to question her in the matter of 20 deaths,Template:Sfn and had made enemies of her own, particularly by luring victims for her husband's execution squads.Template:Sfn The method of her murder also, says Dillon, "implied personal revenge".Template:Sfn With McGlinchey in enforced absence in Portlaoise,Template:Sfn it is likely that her killers took advantage of the chaos of the INLA feud to settle an old score.Template:Sfn Although it is unclear what was requested and what was denied, Holland and McDonald state that McGlinchey applied for permission to attend her funeral.Template:Refn This was refused by the Department of Justice on the grounds of the security risk.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn McGlinchey was reported as being "devastated" by her death.Template:Sfn Although the Justice Department offered him the opportunity to hear a private service for his wife within the prison—with his children and close friend Bernadette Devlin McAliskey attending—McGlinchey refused, demanding he be allowed to attend the funeral.Template:Sfn
Mary may have been killed by the same gang that would later be responsible for McGlinchey's death, part of a "long-running feud", suggested a group of Belfast journalists researching the conflict's mortality rate.Template:Sfn It may also have been over money.Template:Sfn Coogan suggests that her killers—who blamed her for the part she played in the deaths of McMahon and Mackin—flew from the United States the day before and having shot her with borrowed guns, "were back on a plane to America the next day".Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn The Gardaí and the INLA judged it an IPLO operation, and within a few days the latter had assassinated one of that group.Template:Sfn The IRSP concurred, their spokesman Kevin Quillan saying in a radio interview the next day that they "could quite clearly state that we would lay the blame for this brutal murder at the door of the so-called IPLO, one of the factions of these dissident groupings", and further suggested that the IPLO received the assistance of British intelligence in attacking Mary McGlinchey.Template:Sfn Her death appears to have been unconnected with it.Template:Sfn McGlinchey wanted to investigate Mary's death, but he was hampered by the fact that no-one was willing to discuss it with him while the feud continued.Template:Sfn Her death also put an end to the contact between the INLA and the disaffected elements of the East Tyrone Brigade who had contacted McGlinchey.Template:Sfn After their mother's death, Declan and Dominic lived with their maternal and paternal grandparents, in Toomebridge and Bellaghy respectively.Template:Sfn
Following his wife's death, McGlinchey released a statement from Portlaoise in which he denounced the INLA's feud and said that neither he nor Mary had had any dealings with the group since his incarceration begun. He said there was no reason for any organisation to play any part in her funeral.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
In October 1992 McGlinchey applied for temporary parole to see his children over the public holiday, but the request was turned down on security grounds. Two months later he applied again, this time to spend five days over Christmas with them. This request was accepted.Template:Sfn McGlinchey was released for good in March the following year.Template:Sfn He had served seven years of his 10-year sentence.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He announced his intention of refocussing the INLA's efforts on investigating the money laundering activities of the UVF and its connections with Irish gangsterism.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Still politically hardline, he condemned the Hume–Adams talks, as well as the Downing Street Declaration, which he considered a betrayal of the republican ethos.Template:Sfn
Later career
Following his release, McGlinchey lived temporarily in DublinTemplate:Sfn and then moved to 62 Meadowview, south Drogheda.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He found part-time work in a nearby supermarket.Template:Sfn He spent time with his children, taking them on holiday to the Aran Islands.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn The journalist Maggie O'Kane later described McGlinchey's last days: "Since his release from prison last year he had lived on the east coast of Ireland in the town of Drogheda in a house attached to Thornton's grocer's shop and video store. Locals tended to boycott it when they heard McGlinchey had arrived. They believed his occasional appearances at the counter were a cover for a new armed gang he was forming in the Republic".Template:Sfn His old organisation, meanwhile, had continued its campaign, on his release, attempting—but failing—to kill a UVF man in north Belfast in January 1993, for example.Template:Sfn
If McGlinchey had decided to turn his back on armed struggle, suggests Dillon, within a short space of time he discovered that his enemies had not.Template:Sfn In June 1993, he was driving to his son Dominic's birthday party in Newtowndarver, Dundalk. A car pulled up next to him, and McGlinchey, probably thinking it was the Gardaí, approached it. A man with a machine gun got out, but as he was cocking the weapon, McGlinchey grabbed hold of it: a short of fire skimmed McGlinchey's head, but the weapon jammed.Template:Sfn The attacker then drew a pistol, with a number of shots hitting McGlinchey; he, however, was able to take cover in a shrubbery. Coogan comments that one of McGlinchey's children ran after the car to take its number.Template:Sfn Although McGlinchey survived the attack, a bullet was lodged in his skull.Template:Sfn This and others were removed under surgery. McGlinchey was kept under armed guard while recovering in hospital.Template:Sfn
The identity of the gunmen is unknown. McGlinchey, at different times, blamed both British IntelligenceTemplate:Sfn—he said his attackers had English accentsTemplate:Sfn—and the Loyalist leader Billy Wright, whom McGlinchey had previously attempted to assassinate.Template:Sfn The IPLO also claimed responsibility,Template:Sfn although McGlinchey rejected the suggestion.Template:Sfn Reiterating his view that British intelligence was responsible, he claimed that "the only people who would gain from me going home to Bellaghy in a box were the British".Template:Sfn McKittrick suggests that there was much contemporaneous speculation as to the involvement of South Armagh republicans.Template:Sfn Others have also suggested that it was a UVF operation,Template:Sfn or perhaps carried out by friends of Sparky Barkley.Template:Sfn Holland and McDonald comment, however, that:
The choice of venue to gun down one of Ireland's most notorious paramilitary figures...pointed to the real identity of the gang. It was not an accident that they had chosen the spot near Ardee, County Louth, because it was there that he assumed the leadership of the INLA almost exactly ten years before.Template:Sfn
Notwithstanding his disowning of the INLA, McGlinchey, it seems, also had scores to settle, for both the attack on him and the death of his wife. When he was released from Portlaoise he said had a death-list naming 15 enemies.Template:Sfn Some contemporaries, though, have stated that he appears to have mellowed after Mary's death.Template:Sfn He had moved to Drogheda and was now living in near-anonymity; few of his neighbours were aware of his past. He may have felt that having effectively left the INLA, his enemies would forget him—or at least, argues Dillon, not risk travelling that far into the Republic of Ireland to target him.Template:Sfn He was still involved with the movement ideologically, however, and with McAliskey, he was working on a draft constitution for a united Ireland.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Comments Dolan, "although there were some suggestions that he was trying to assemble a new republican unit and returning to the racketeering he had engaged in throughout the 1980s, he strongly denied it".Template:Sfn For their part, the Gardaí believed him responsible for a number of armed robberies that took place in Counties Louth and Tipperary in early 1994.Template:Sfn According to McGlinchey's son Dominic, speaking in 2014, his father was working alongside a senior Provisional IRA man investigating links between a corrupt IRA unit and the UVF in Dublin.Template:Sfn
Death
In Northern Ireland, by spring 1994, writes Moloney, "the violence continued apace...with both republicans and loyalists killing freely".Template:Sfn The INLA's 1986–1987 feud had also reignited.Template:Sfn Sinn Féin was promoting a strategy of peace to the IRA and the mainstream republican movement.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn A former Provisional explained to Dillon why McGlinchey was more vulnerable than he probably realised. Part of McGlinchey's problem, the volunteer said, was that after his release he "no longer had a terrorist group to protect him". The source said that, without the safe-houses, the intelligence reports, the support network and the instinctive security precautions that had guided his life on the run, he had become "as vulnerable as some of those people [he] used to target. That was McGlinchey's problem. He failed to understand that he'd become a sitting duck".Template:Sfn The journalist Fergal Keane wrote that by the time of McGlinchey's death, "there was no-one left in the organisation to protect him".Template:Sfn
At around 9:30 on the evening of Thursday, 10 February 1994, McGlinchey had visited friends of his in Duleek Road, near his home, and dined there. He left around forty minutes later, intending to take a video back to a shop in Brookville, on the north side of town.Template:Sfn McGlinchey later described his father's demeanour that night as "agitated and emotionally upset". He said he asked his father whether he believed he was in danger from the IRA, to which McGlinchey replied "I am just sick of my name being blackened by men who never fired a shot...no, the IRA would never kill me, son".Template:Sfn At around 11Template:Nbsppm McGlinchey and the 16-year-old Dominic were returning home,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn when—"for reasons never made clear", says DillonTemplate:Sfn—McGlinchey pulled up to make a phone call from a public kiosk on Hardman's Gardens,Template:Sfn near Lourdes Hospital.Template:Sfn Almost immediately—despite the presence of four witnessesTemplate:Sfn—a red MazdaTemplate:Sfn pulled up alongside him.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn While his son watched from the car,Template:Sfn three men got out and beat McGlinchey. Once McGlinchey was on the ground the men—who were armed with three pump action shotgunsTemplate:Sfn and a pistol—fired into him 14 times.Template:Sfn The attack finished with a coup de grâce to the head, although he was dead already.Template:Sfn His last words were reputed to be "Jesus, Mary help me"; his son yelled for an ambulance.Template:Sfn According to the first officer on the scene, Dominic junior told her, "it's my dad, it's my dad, he's been shot. Quick, get up the checkpoints".Template:Sfn "The horrifying impact of witnessing such cold brutality on McGlinchey's son can only be guessed at", observe Holland and McDonald.Template:Sfn
The following day, an autopsy was carried out in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, which showed McGlinchey had been hit in the neck, skull, the left upper chest, the left arm, and both legs.Template:Sfn His inquest was held in Drogheda two weeks later, suspended and then reopened in November 1996.Template:Sfn Gardaí forensic officers told the coroner that they had compared the cartridge casings they had found with the database but no matches had been made to other weapons; the officer noted that no such information had been received from the RUC.Template:Sfn The shotguns used were impossible to trace ballistically,Template:Sfn but it had been ascertained that the Mazda was registered in the north.Template:Sfn Bernadette McAliskey made a statement for the family, in which she condemned the Gardaí's investigation into the McGlinchey's killing and suggested that the killers were two known UVF men from the north.Template:Sfn Further, she said
Despite the fact that he was himself under constant Garda surveillance, despite a previous attempt on his life and the existence of photo fit identification of two assailants in that attempt and the fact that they bear an uncanny resemblance to two known members of the UVF in the North, it is inconceivable to the McGlinchey family that the Gardai have been unable to keep any, further progress in this inquiry.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
The Gardaí stated that they were not watching McGlinchey, and that "he was not hiding. He drove his car around the town and was known to us here." They also stated that they did not believe that he had been engaged in criminal conspiracies or activities.Template:Sfn Keane directly linked McGlinchey's and his wife's deaths to the killings of McMahon and Mackin years before. Keane suggests that an associate of the dead men had already returned to Dundalk in 1989—when it had seemed as if McGlinchey's appeal might be successful—from abroad and had been open about his intentions if McGlinchey was released.Template:Sfn Following McGlinchey's death, a number of stories appeared in the Irish press accusing him of drug dealingTemplate:Refn and other crimes, such as fencing stolen lorries from the border region. Coogan asserts that these stories were the product of Garda Special Branch press briefings.Template:Sfn
Funeral
McGlinchey was buried in Bellaghy. Around 60 mourners, mostly family, saw off his body from Drogheda before the journey north. McAliskey kissed the coffin, which was carried by her, Sean McGlinchey, Dominic junior and Father O'Daly, who had given McGlinchey the last rites on Hardman's Gardens. The hearse was accompanied by what the Gardaí described as a "low key" security operation. Their spokesman said "we did not wish to flood the scene with Gardaí or there would have been more of them than mourners".Template:Sfn
McGlinchey's funeral was held on 13 February 1994 in Bellaghy,Template:Sfn with no republican accoutrements.Template:Sfn There was no INLA colour party,Template:Sfn and only an Irish tricolor draped over the coffin.Template:Sfn Over 1,500 people attendedTemplate:Sfn watched closely by 200 RUC.Template:Sfn Police armoured vans were held on the perimeter.Template:Sfn McGlinchey was buried alongside Mary and their young daughter Máire.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn His coffin was carried from the McGlinchey family home to St Mary's ChurchTemplate:Sfn by pall-bearers who were swapped out from the crowd every 40-yards or so.Template:Sfn Martin McGuinnessTemplate:Sfn was among them, as was Bernadette McAliskey and her daughter Róisín.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Refn McGlinchey's sons carried the coffin for the final yards;Template:Sfn comments Keane, "Dominic and Declan McGlinchey have seen more than most because of the troubles in Northern Ireland".Template:Sfn The priest, Father Michael Flanagan, condemned what he called the media's glorification of McGlinchey's killing, telling the crowd "no-one deserved to die like that. There's a little bit of good in the worst of us and a little bit of bad in the best."Template:Sfn Dillon's anonymous Provisional source confirmed that McGuinness's presence at the funeral indicated the high-standing as a soldier in which the IRA held McGlinchey, despite its disapproval of his organisation.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's grave had a flagpole next to it from which a Tricolour flew after the burial.Template:Sfn His grave lies a short distance from that of Francis Hughes, who had died on hunger strike in May 1981.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Bernadette McAliskey gave the graveside oration, which effectively eulogised McGlinchey.Template:Sfn She condemned the recent press coverage which had accused McGlinchey of drug dealing and criminality and said of the journalists responsible that they wereTemplate:Sfn
Curs and dogs. May every one of them rot in hell. They have taken away Dominic McGlinchey's character and they will stand judgement for it. He was the finest republican of them all. He never dishonoured the cause he believed in. His war was with the armed soldiers and the police of this state.Template:Sfn
Following this speech, some of the mourners turned on the observing press corps and shouted abuse, reported The Times.Template:Sfn A couple of months after the funeral, McAliskey later explained her thinking to The Guardian. Their reporter, David Sharrock, asked if her tirade had been intended to counteract the negative stories about McGlinchey that had recently appeared in the press.Template:Sfn McAliskey said
It's very difficult to conduct a conversation about a person who bore no resemblance in the media to the person I knew for 10 years. His thinking was just fundamentally democratic and to acknowledge that Dominic McGlinchey had an intellect was to acknowledge the reality of this conflict here. Republicanism is not simply anti-partitionist and confined to Ireland. It is a tradition of secular egalitarian democracy. So yes. Dominic was the finest republican of his generation. The rest of it I might take back...I don't even believe in hell.Template:Sfn
In the New Statesman the following month, the journalist and political activist Eamonn McCann—discussing Sinn Féin's "search for respectability"—considered the speech of his "old comrade" McAliskey,Template:Refn which he said he had been "taken aback by the ferocity" of. However, said McCann, in context this was less surprising than should otherwise have been expected. The press coverage of McGlinchey's death, argued McCann, suggested that "the killing had been a good thing [and] the details of how he died were recounted with undisguised relish". The focus, he said, was on portraying McGlinchey was different from the brand of Irish republicanism that was increasingly becoming part of mainstream political discourse.Template:Sfn
Family and personal life
McGlinchey was raised a CatholicTemplate:Sfn and remained so for the rest of his life, although he described himself as a "believing one" rather than a practising one.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn
While imprisoned,Template:Sfn on 5 July 1975 McGlinchey married Mary, daughter of PatrickTemplate:Sfn O'Neil from Toomebridge.Template:Sfn The author Ed Moloney describes her as a "formidable" woman, who became an "experienced and ruthless operator in her own right".Template:Sfn Dominic and Mary had two sons, Declan, born in 1978, and Dominic, who was a year younger.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn They also had a daughter Maíre, in 1985; she died of meningitis the following year.Template:Sfn
Three of McGlinchey's brothers joined the IRA. Sean was convicted of the 1973 Coleraine bombings and received a life sentence;Template:Sfn he became a Sinn Féin councillor after the Belfast Agreement.Template:Sfn Paul was jailed for 14 yearsTemplate:Sfn after attempting to assassinate the Reverend Overend in 1976—whom the INLA would later try and blow up on McGlinchey's orders; he later stood against Sinn Féin in the 2007 Assembly election.Template:Sfn A third brother, Michael, was convicted of IRA membership.Template:Sfn McGlinchey's son Declan was also active in the republican socialist movement and remained living in Bellaghy. In 2009 he was arrested and investigated under suspicion of involvement in the Real IRA's attack on Masereene Barracks.Template:Sfn Declan died of a suspected heart attack in Bellaghy on 31 October 2015. He was given what the Irish News described as a "paramilitary-style funeral", involving a masked colour party and a gun salute the night before.Template:Sfn His brother, Dominic ÓgTemplate:SfnTemplate:Refn supported the Adams-McGuinness Sinn Féin leadership until 2007, when they endorsed the PSNI.Template:Sfn He has been critical of the party since, describing them as "not too different to that of any corporate company".Template:Sfn Since then, however, he has stated that he does not "see mass appetite at a street level for the armed campaign", and has stated his wish to "start to have a conversation about the removal of the gun from Irish politics" with dissident groups.Template:Sfn He is also involved in broader left-wing activism such as opposition to the Iraq War.Template:Sfn Dominic, like Declan, was also named in court as having been implicated in the Masereerne attack,Template:Sfn which he denied.Template:Sfn On his father's death, Dominic Óg is reported as believing that McGlinchey was killed in order to remove a potential obstacle to the burgeoning Peace Process.Template:Refn
Aftermath and legacy
{{#invoke:Infobox|infobox}}Template:Template other
Aftermath
McGlinchey's death did not stop the INLA's internal feuding,Template:Sfn and by this point, says Coogan, it had also turned to drug dealing and racketeering.Template:Sfn In 1996, another INLA chief of staff—Gino Gallagher—was also shot dead, probably by a rival faction. This led to a further bloody feud.Template:Sfn McGlinchey had "helped keep the INLA on the map after the hunger strike", says Davies,Template:Sfn and Holland and McDonald suggest that the INLA's fragmentation after his death indicates McGlinchey's importance to the organisation. They argued that he acted as "a makeshift bolt"; while he was alive, and particularly while he was operational, the bolt had held the component parts of the group together. But with his death, "that terror machine finally broke into disparate parts. The descent into chaos had begun."Template:Sfn Although the armed struggle continued, it was generally ineffectual. The INLA cast itself as defenders of the Catholic community and tried to take the war to Loyalism. However, over the next few years the group killed over 40 civilians and 10 of its own volunteers while accounting for only five loyalists.Template:Sfn
Legacy
The scholar Arwel Ellis Owen has blamed McGlinchey for the INLA's subsequent descent into factionalism, which he argues was a direct result of McGlinchey's being on the run throughout his leadership. His enforced absence, Owen suggests, prevented him from taking day-to-day control.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn This was particularly caused by McGlinchey's emasculation of the Army Council and collective decision-making processes; when he left, there was no-one to fill the vacuum his departure created.Template:Sfn The INLA's increased focus on internecine feuding also distracted them their political or strategic aims.Template:Sfn and McGlinchey has also been criticised for failing to support the political struggle waged by the IRSP. Their finances were consistently low or non-existent and they relied on the military wing to provide them with funds. Little was forthcoming, in spite of the INLA's numerous successful robberies. McGlinchey appears, therefore, to have had little interest in any form of struggle other than the military. This was despite, note Holland and McDonald, of concerns raised by seasoned INLA men such as Harry Flynn and Gerry Roche that socialist politics and activity was fundamental to the existence of both groups.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Despite McGlinchey's claim that his priority for the republican socialist movement to provide "political leadership on the class struggle in Ireland", argues the author Daniel Finn, politics "withered on the vine" under his command.Template:Sfn McGlinchey, commented the author Thomas G. Mitchell, "had minimal interest in the party. Instead, he wanted to ake the INLA the most ruthless and feared terrorist group in Northern Ireland."Template:Sfn Although McAliskey praised the memory of McGlinchey, in practical terms, suggest Holland and McDonald, his "effect on the organisation Mrs McAliskey once supported was negative", and his legacy should be seen as division and paranoia within the INLA, they suggest. Template:Sfn It is possible that, before he was killed, McGlinchey had come to regret leaving the IRA. One of their ex-volunteers told Dillon that had McGlinchey remained with the Provisionals, they "would have stood him down from active service. He'd probably still be alive and part of the peace process."Template:Sfn Alternatively, it has been suggested that McGlinchey had already been identified by elements within the IRA opposed to Sinn Féin's peace strategy as a potential future rallying point for dissidents.Template:Sfn
Dermot Finucane, brother of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, later told the investigative author Kevin Toolis that the "Wanted" posters put up about McGlinchey and Hughes influenced him to join the IRA in 1978. Finucane told Toolis how "I remember seeing Dominic McGlinchey and Ian Milne and Francis Hughes 'Wanted' posters when they were on the run as the most wanted men in Ulster, and I remember mentally saying: 'That is what you want, you want to inflict so much damage on the enemy they want you badly'".Template:Sfn McGlinchey was commemorated in the INLA wing of the Maze Prison with a mural on a communal wall. McGlinchey is portrayed in a black beret and against a fiery background and a silhouetted hillside. The caption read "Comrade Dominic McGlinchey. Proudly remembered by the INLA POWs. Long Kesh".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Similarly, the scholar Paul K. Clare said that, while researching public opinion in Northern Ireland, he asked a group of young men in Turf Lodge "if there was any one individual who they admired more than anyone else. 'Mad Dog' McGlinchey" was their reply."Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Such views, argues Clare, were "not so uncommon that they would be considered abnormal".Template:Sfn
Personality and reputation
Personality and approach
The author Martin Dillon met McGlinchey in the mid-1980s and described him as "six feet tall, and lean, with a receding hairline. In his 30s, his slightly rounded face gave him the look of a much younger man."Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Coogan also visited McGlinchey in Portlaoise and wrote that he appeared "tired, reduced by his past and by prison".Template:Sfn He had a tricolour tattoo on his left forearm.Template:Sfn The Gardaí later described McGlinchey as vain, and enjoying melodrama.Template:Sfn Edna O'Brien described him as "most reflective and at the same time most forthcoming".Template:Sfn She later told Marianne Heron of the Irish Independent that she had told McGlinchey "that she liked everything about him except what he was [and] he told her that his mother said the same thing".Template:Sfn O'Brien also denied ever having an affair with McGlinchey; she claimed later that, as a result of her research for a book, she had to refute questions as to whether she "had love affairs with republicans".Template:SfnTemplate:Refn His reputation, suggests the writer Jonathan Stevenson, became that of "fabled killer",Template:Sfn while Coogan describes him as "a latter-day Ned Kelly",Template:Sfn as committed to republicanism as Frances HughesTemplate:Sfn yet with far greater notoriety.Template:Sfn He was also, suggest Holland and McDonald, "probably the most famous and most charismatic INLA chief of staff since Séamus Costello".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Where Costello ruled by collective agreement, though, McGlinchey ruled by decree;Template:Sfn his tenure as INLA chief of staff has been summed up as "brutal, authoritarian, but nonetheless still relatively cohesive" by researcher Gary Ackerman.Template:Sfn
McGlinchey, at his own estimate, killed "around...30" people in his career, of whom all but one, he said, were members of the security forces;Template:SfnTemplate:Refn the historian Keith Jeffery has calculated that McGlinchey was responsible for 28 murders, 30 bombings and 11 armed robberies.Template:Sfn According to the journalist Nicholas Davies, his victims were "mainly officers of the RUC, the army and the UDR. He also murdered civilians."Template:Sfn Holland and McDonald suggest that during his tenure as Chief of Staff McGlinchey "held the organisation together" at a time when it was expected to implode.Template:Sfn McGlinchey, a contemporary said, "made his own luck",Template:Sfn and Davies described McGlinchey as "a fearless man who would take extraordinary risks", particularly in his tactic of close-quarters engagements.Template:Sfn The scholar C. M. Drake notes, however, that "where there is little protection for a human target...a close-quarter assassination is a simple option".Template:Sfn
After his death, an IRSP spokesman, Fra Halligan defended McGlinchey's lack of political idealism, pointing out that he "wouldn't have had any problem saying [so] to you".Template:Sfn For example, when Adams ideologically linked the republican campaign to the ANC's struggles in South Africa against Apartheid, McGlinchey is claimed to have said that, in rural nationalist areas "they don't know anything about Mandela but they see Brits in their fields and they don't like it".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn McGlinchey summed up his own approach as being "to do what had to be done and don't think about it thereafter".Template:Sfn Although he was never completely unafraid, he said—"you need a certain amount of fear to keep you on edge"Template:Sfn—he believed in controlling his fear and that, ultimately, he had a stronger motivation to fight than his enemy.Template:Sfn He also claimed to take no pleasure in killing. During his interview with Vincent Browne, Browne asked him what his greatest regret was. After a pause, McGlinchey told him about a Protestant boy he had grown up with. The boy had joined the RUC and subsequently been killed by the IRA; "McGlinchey said he felt badly about that".Template:Sfn
The ex-volunteer who spoke to Dillon also discussed McGlinchey's approach to various aspects of his leadership. He commented, for example, with regard to McGlinchey's views on informers ("a bullet in the head—no messing"), drugs (not tolerated), civilian casualties ("he would just say it was war") and sectarianism ("he took the view that if they killed our people, we should strike back but he didn't spend his time going around saying "let's kill all the Prods").Template:Sfn He concludes that McGlinchey "was not a holy Joe, but his main targets were the British war machine".Template:Sfn A Gardaí source told The Times, "he lived by the gun and died by the gun. He was not a man who was going to die in his bed of old age".Template:Sfn McGlinchey saw himself similarly. In an interview with the Starry Plough, he commented—when asked what the effect of his death or capture would have—that "the movement will not end with me. I'm only one individual, not God."Template:Sfn He also refuted that he had ever, or ever would, become a legend, telling a journalist "I'm no Che Guevara, just an ordinary Irish republican socialist who is determined to strive for a free socialist Ireland".Template:Sfn O'Kane compared his and his wife's cooperation as having a "touch of Bonnie and Clyde" about them, she wrote.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
McGlinchey's falling out with the Provisionals in the late 1970s, commented an anonymous colleague, indicated that he could issue orders but was a very poor follower of them.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Other ex-comrades have since described him as "volatile and impulsive", and his approach to man-management as "if you're on the run you should be armed. If not, fuck off home."Template:Sfn Another called him a "cunning countryman [who] liked to manipulate others but did not like to be in overall responsibility".Template:Sfn His treatment of popular and previously loyal INLA men such as Barkley convinced many of those under him that he would brook no dissent or questioning of his orders. The result was bad news for the INLA's cohesion, as paranoia and fear became widespread. to the extent that, when attending Army Council meetings, say Holland and McDonald, some members would only go armed.Template:Sfn However, they also argue, it could never be said of McGlinchey, as it could of so many of his colleagues, that his struggle was motivated by personal gain: he was motivated solely by ideology.Template:Sfn One such fellow traveller of McGlinchey's later described the INLA leader thus:Template:Sfn
He wasn't the mad dog the media talked about. He was very focussed. People would listen when he talked. He had a grasp of international politics and often discussed the agendas of other revolutionary movements. He wanted to see the INLA as part of an international socialist brigade. He was also a hard man and when anyone stepped out of line—God help him or her.Template:Sfn
Reputation
Christopher S. Morrison of the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes McGlinchey as earning "a personal reputation for sheer readiness to murder that no single republican figure of the Troubles has come close to challenging".Template:Sfn A lieutenant general in the British Army, Maurice Robert Johnston, later described McGlinchey as a "lunatic", and more of an enemy to the British government than Martin McGuinness. McGlinchey not only lacked McGuinness's restraint, said Johnston, but would "shoot his own mother and all the rest of it".Template:Sfn McGlinchey's "Mad Dog" nickname was given him by the security servicesTemplate:SfnTemplate:Refn—the modern historian Ruán O'Donnell calls the term a "pejorative soubriquet"Template:Sfn—who considered him a "psycho".Template:Sfn Dillon suggests that, in reality, the army did not consider him a mad dog but a "committed terrorist who had proved...dangerous and unpredictable",Template:Sfn while the investigative journalist Mark Urban says McGlinchey had "driven the INLA into active and reasonably effective terrorism".Template:Sfn The former INLA Chief of Staff—who McGlinchey had failed to re-recruit in the late 1970s—later told how he was ultimately deterred when he considered the direction McGlinchey wanted to take the group in. Holland and Mcdonald tell how—the two men having shared a cell in Portlaoise for some time—the ex-chief considered McGlinchey to be "unpredictable", and that his involvement increased the likelihood of a bloodbath at some point.Template:Sfn A Garda who knew McGlinchey during his last term of imprisonment said that notwithstanding the urbane, academic facade McGlinchey adopted, he was still "a complete dictator" who wanted to dominate all around him.Template:Sfn
The label "Mad Dog", argue Holland and McDonald, is a misnomer: he was neither mad nor a dog. For example, they say, by the time of his death he was sufficiently well versed in the constitution—the result of his studies in Portlaoise—to cogently argue against the Downing Street Declaration, which was being negotiated shortly before he died.Template:Sfn Republicans tended to ignore the "Mad Dog" and "psycho" tags, which they deemed to part of what they believed to be a normal British propaganda campaign,Template:SfnTemplate:Refn albeit, says the author Gene Kerrigan, "in a cartoon fashion, as a bogeyman".Template:Sfn Ackerman has argued that the fact McGlinchey was able to spend so long on the run demonstrates the level of support he enjoyed in the countryside.Template:Sfn Another of McGlinchey's Portlaoise companions argued that he was comparable to the hero of a previous generation of republicans, O'Donovan Rossa,Template:Sfn while the literary critic Richard Pine has called McGlinchey's career of violence part of the continuing republican theme, arguing that the "'religion of ecstasy' which carried Emmet, Pearse and Plunkett through the blood-sacrifice has also...sustained Terence McSwiney in 1920, the hunger-strikers in Long Kesh and sustain[ed] Dominic McGlinchey".Template:Sfn McCann argued that McGlinchey "wasn't way out of line with, and can't be cast from, the mainstream history of nationalist Ireland".Template:Sfn
At his last trial, McGlinchey's defence counsel argued that, like thousands of others of his generation, "but for the fact that he was born in the community of South Derry, it is highly unlikely that he would ever be before any court".Template:Sfn Holland and McDonald believed that McGlinchey would have known he would not meet with a peaceful death.Template:Sfn On one occasion he stated his belief that "I will be remembered for nothing. I have no illusions about myself. There is no glory or anything to this. The only people who will remember me will be my family and particularly my children."Template:Sfn It is possible that the June 1993 assassination attempt had brought out a fatalistic quality in him, for during one interview he commented on his nickname, saying "what do you do with a Mad Dog except put it down?".Template:Sfn Before his death, he told a local detective "you either hide or you go on living as long as you can".Template:Sfn Vincent Browne asked McGlinchey what he thought would happen to him eventually. McGlinchey answered:Template:Sfn
I will probably get shot. There is a good possibility of my not seeing the end of the struggle. I could be lucky but just because I have been set up by the media as the most wanted man in Ireland, I suppose that increases the chances of my getting done in. But I don't really give it a lot of thought, I always try to avoid being shot.Template:Sfn
Cultural depictions
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In the early 1990sTemplate:Sfn novelist Edna O'Brien interviewed McGlinchey several timesTemplate:Sfn in Portlaoise while meticulouslyTemplate:Sfn researching her novel House of Splendid Isolation. In the novel, the protagonist is an on-the-run republican terrorist named Roger McGreevy. Believing he has found an empty house to hole up in, he discovers an elderly woman in residence.Template:Sfn The narrative explores the evolving relationship between the two, which moves from fear and distrust on her part to "a sort of mutual liking, even tenderness", writes the critic John Dunne, although noting that McGreevy "is no Mad Dog".Template:Sfn The scholar Richard Bradford argues that the novel indicates a degree of "macabre" hero worship on behalf of O'Brien towards McGlinchey, upon whom scholars accept she generally based the character and who she treats with concomitant sympathy:Template:Sfn McGreevy describes himself as seeking "Justice. Personal identity. Truth".Template:Sfn Similarities between McGreevy and McGlinchey include their wives having been killed previously, both being interned at a young age and both spending their lives on the run.Template:Sfn O'Brien, comments the researcher John Maher, "builds up, through the old woman's interactions with McGreevy, an increasingly sympathetic picture of the terrorist [which] reflects O 'Brien's own strong republican sympathies".Template:Sfn O'Brien's interviews with McGlinchey were themselves notorious, and demonstrated her willingness to court controversy.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn O'Brien herself denied that the character was McGlinchey. She countered that, while "he certainly played a strong part in the people that talked to me", McGreevy was a composite of many different men.Template:Sfn
The central character of Martin McDonagh's 2001 black comedy—and "satire on sectarian violence"Template:Sfn—The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Padraic, was based on the public image of McGlinchey, according to Morrison.Template:Sfn Set against the backdrop of the early days of the Peace Process, "Mad Patrick" is stated to be a member of the INLA in 1993 Ireland. Padraic's activities involve pulling out the toenails of drug dealers, assassination and torture.Template:Sfn Morrison, though, argues that "some of McDonagh's information was derived from a highly inaccurate image of McGlinchey provided by sensationalist British and Irish newspaper reports at the time of the prolific murderer's heyday", and argues that, unknowingly, McDonagh has reiterated this image.Template:Sfn The author Henry McDonald, writing in The Guardian, agrees that Padraic "bears some comparison with the real life" of McGlinchey, as both are portrayed as being "too extreme even for the Provisional IRA".Template:Sfn
A 2007 Irish film reinterpretion of Macbeth—retitled Mickey B. and filmed in Maghaberry Prison—was set against the backdrop of prison drug dealing.Template:Sfn The murder of Macduff's family in act IV scene ii, comments the director Tom Magill, "draws heavily" on the 1987 murder of Mary McGlinchey while bathing her children.Template:Sfn Magill later explainedTemplate:Sfn
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Audiences abroad often miss the parallels in the film—e.g. the assassination of Macduff 's family draws heavily upon the assassination of the wife of Irish National Liberation Army leader Dominic McGlinchey, Mary McGlinchey, bathing her two children at home.Template:Sfn{{#if:|
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The central figure in Shane MacGown's 1997 song "Paddy Public Enemy No. 1" is based on McGlinchey; when asked his opinion of him, MacGowan said "he was a great man".Template:Sfn The Irish Brigade's ballad, "Hands Up, Trousers Down" referenced McGlinchey's treatment of the Gardaí while on the run.Template:Sfn
See also
Notes
References
Bibliography
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External links
- Pages with broken file links
- 1954 births
- 1994 deaths
- Date of birth missing
- Irish National Liberation Army members
- Irish republicans imprisoned on terrorism charges
- Irish republicans interned without trial
- Overturned convictions in the United Kingdom
- People extradited from Ireland
- People extradited to the United Kingdom
- People from Bellaghy
- People killed during The Troubles (Northern Ireland)
- Provisional Irish Republican Army members