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. 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. 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: 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. 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. McGlinchey was now able to act without reference to the rest of the organisation when he chose. Dolan describes him as "unleash[ing] a reign of personal terror over the undisciplined organisation; opponents and suspected informers were ruthlessly purged", 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". As a result of the free licence this policy gave McGlinchey, tensions heightened with other republicans, particularly in South Armagh. 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'". Following a series of counter-productive actions in Belfast, McGlinchey refocussed on the rural areas, whose commanders he told to "pull their weight".
Droppin Well bombing {{Quote box|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|quote= Following McGlinchey's criticism of the Derry Brigade's lack of activity, they devised a plan that met with his approval. 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 bombing and to ensure maximum casualties. He knew, but ignored, the near-inevitability of civilian deaths. On 6 December 1982 17 people—11 soldiers of the
Cheshire Regiment and six civilians—were killed after a timebomb exploded in the middle of a disco. This brought the roof of the pub in. To McGlinchey, they—whether Protestant or Catholic—were
fraternising with the enemy. Four of the dead were women; the INLA's subsequent claim of responsibility described them and the other injured women as "consorts". Although McGlinchey later claimed that the bar owner had received multiple warnings against serving soldiers, it is unlikely that any such warnings were given. Following the Droppin Well bombing, McGlinchey became a "hate figure":
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", 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". 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: 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. This was despite the INLA being still a legal organisation at that point and McGlinchey himself—having already absconded from
bail while in the north—being on the run and unobtainable. 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. 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. There were also concerns that Irish people were the subject of
miscarriages of justice in mainland Britain. 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. 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". 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. McGlinchey,
in absentia, fought the decision. 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". 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. In a two-hour hearing,
Chief Justice Tom O'Higgins rejected this claim also. 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". 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. "An elderly grandmother riddled with bullets", he continued, was in no way what "reasonable civilised people would regard as political activity". 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".
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. In spite of secret surveillance south of the border, the
Special Reconnaissance Unit 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. Grew was a close friend of Mary McGlinchey. By tailing Grew north of the border, the SRU hoped to be led to McGlinchey. 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. 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. McGlinchey—the intended target—had been seen getting into their car in the south by The Det surveillance. He was believed to be bringing a bag of guns into the north. This was not the case; the handbrake was on, and neither were Grew or Carroll armed. It seems probable that he had been in the vehicle a few minutes earlier, but had alighted before reaching the roadblock, with what the Belfast priest and peace activist
Fra Raymond Murray has called an "instinctive intuition". 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. 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". Six months after Grew and Carroll were killed, McGlinchey believed he had found the source of E4A's information:
Eric Dale, he believed, had provided the RUC with the information they required to locate Grew and Carroll. 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". McGlinchey's role in the operation was to keep McMahon calm in the front room while other gang members interrogated Dale in the hallway. Mary McGlinchey was part of this team. 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. 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. 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. As the Dale case illustrates, McGlinchey occasionally tortured his victims, often "with the aid of instruments such as a red-hot poker", says Coogan, often using Tom McCartan, a "quick-tempered and violent man", for such work. McGlinchey's efforts in
counterintelligence did not stand in the way of the armed campaign. In May 1983 both McGlincheys, with two other men, took part in a
drive by gun attack on a
Cookstown checkpoint, him with a machine gun and her using a pistol. A police constable
reservist,
Colin Carson, was killed and fire was exchanged between those in the van and the RUC in a
sangar. McGlinchey's fingerprints were later found in the van. The operation, said the
UPI at the time, was claimed by the IRA's
Tyrone Brigade as their responsibility, although it is generally considered to have been carried out by McGlinchey's group. Money and weapons were essential for the INLA's campaign, and McGlinchey—by now accompanied by Dessie O'Hare—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. Another two robberies in
Cork brought the group £300,000 between them. 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. McMahon was an associate of
Patrick Mackin—with whom McGlinchey was involved in a personal feud—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": Mary had lured them there for her husband to kill. British intelligence also continued its attempts to capture McGlinchey. One extreme tactic, allegedly used in October 1983, was described by
The Guardian as "badly botched". 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". 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. 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. 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. At the debriefing of the surviving volunteers, an attendee later recalled, McGlinchey "went mad and called us all stupid cunts". 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. 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. He was not believed. Following interrogation, Barkley was shot on McGlinchey's orders by either Paul "Bonanza" McCann or Mary McGlinchey.
Darkley massacre 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?", 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, which it called a "token retaliation". The RUC confirmed that weaponry used in previous INLA operations had been used. The INLA, however, denied involvement and condemned the attack, although McGlinchey later acknowledged the presence of an INLA volunteer in the group to whom, McGlinchey admitted, he had loaned a
Ruger rifle. McGlinchey expressed dismay at the attack 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. McGlinchey quickly acted to put distance between himself and the Darkley massacre. 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". 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." Coogan also suggests that the man who planned the attack was "clearly deranged". 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". Darkley was yet another propaganda disaster for the INLA, and whether McGlinchey liked it or not, symbolised what it was best known for. 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. McGlinchey's tactics for evading capture, the Gardaí later reported, included never staying in the one place too long and frequently disguising his appearance. 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".
Sunday Tribune interview Six days after the Darkley attack, McGlinchey gave an interview to the
Sunday Tribune, conducted by its editor,
Vincent Browne. Browne said that the public had a
right to know about McGlinchey, and McGlinchey was keen to put his side of the story across, as by now the IRA had also condemned Darkley as purely sectarian. 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. 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 interviewed 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. 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. 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'. 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". 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". McGlinchey showed no remorse for his activities, said Browne, only a "frightening indifference". After the interview was published, the Gardaí visited the
Tribune's offices and studied it minutely to extract any clue as to his whereabouts. 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.
Capture The manhunt for McGlinchey and his gang involved hundreds of soldiers and Gardaí, while the media "followed their trail around the Republic in some awe". A Gardaí patrol eventually discovered him accidentally in
Cork City on 2 December 1983. Far from being a police triumph, the encounter was "one of the more farcical incidents" among what Dolan calls their "
picaresque" manhunt. Two Gardaí knocked on the door and, receiving no answer, attempted to force an entry. McGlinchey−with Mary−and comrades were covering them with their guns as the police entered. A later report suggested that Mary had wanted to kill them, but her husband restrained her. The republicans made them strip at gunpoint—a tactic McGlinchey used a number of times in encounters with the Gardaí—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 escaped with the help of a local man. McGlinchey's "humiliation" of the Gardaí, says Dillon, "energised" the manhunt. 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'". The gang were armed with
automatic assault rifles, pump-action shotguns and short arms. 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 surrounded—on
St Patrick's Day 1984 in
County Clare. 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. The Gardaí's
Security Task Force—numbering 40 men—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. 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. Both sides exchanged shots, until a priest was sent in to negotiate with McGlinchey from the bottom of the stairs. At 7:15pm, having been wounded, and to safeguard Mrs Lyons, and both their children—McGlinchey's were nearby, in the care of a supporter—he surrendered. 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. ==Extradition, imprisonment, release and imprisonment==