159 Facts About Dominic McGlinchey

Dominic McGlinchey was an Irish republican paramilitary leader who moved from the Provisional IRA to become head of the Irish National Liberation Army paramilitary group in the early 1980s.

Dominic McGlinchey was convicted of hijacking a police vehicle and threatening officers with a gun.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were leading the Republic to re-evaluate its position and Dominic McGlinchey became the first Republican to be extradited to Northern Ireland.

Dominic McGlinchey was released in March 1993 and, claiming to have no further involvement with the INLA, moved to Drogheda.

Dominic McGlinchey survived an assassination attempt soon after his release from prison, but in February 1994 he was shot to death in front of one of his children while using a public phone.

Dominic McGlinchey has remained an influence on Irish fiction and music, with both Edna O'Brien and Martin McDonagh producing pieces based on Dominic McGlinchey's life and career.

Founder members included Jimmy Brown, Tom McCartan, Gino Gallagher, Dessie O'Hare and Gerard "Dr Death" Steenson, most of whom Dominic McGlinchey would fight with over the next decade.

Dominic McGlinchey was born in 1954, in the family home in Ballyscullion Road, Bellaghy, in rural south County Londonderry.

Dominic McGlinchey was the third of eleven children in a staunchly republican family.

Dominic McGlinchey's father owned a garage; some of his father's police customers would later die at McGlinchey's hands.

Dominic McGlinchey was one of those interned as a result, interrupting his fledgeling career as a car mechanic.

Dominic McGlinchey spent five days being interrogated in Shackleton Barracks; like his fellow internees, he had no access to either family or legal representation.

Dominic McGlinchey was then transferred to Magilligan Prison, and later Long Kesh.

One man imprisoned with Dominic McGlinchey later recalled him as "a big kid out of his depth" who possessed only a limited knowledge of republican history and ideology.

Particularly in the clubs and bars Dominic 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.

Dominic McGlinchey was arrested in 1973 for possession of guns, for which he received 18 months imprisonment.

Dominic 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.

Hughes and Dominic McGlinchey were really close even though Dominic McGlinchey seemed a lot older.

Dominic McGlinchey was a tough guy and nobody gave him lip.

Dominic McGlinchey wanted to terrorise the security forces the way they terrorised our people.

Dominic McGlinchey particularly favoured those of the latter who lived in isolated, exposed houses, as this made them particularly vulnerable.

Dominic McGlinchey later calculated that this amounted to over 200 operations over "an intricate maze of fields, lanes, country roads and ditches with which they were intimately familiar".

Dominic McGlinchey was annoyed and cursed them up and down, but he let them in and allowed them to stay.

In June 1973, Dominic McGlinchey's unit left a car bomb in Coleraine; six people were killed.

Dominic McGlinchey was active in internal security, particularly hunting down those he believed to be assisting the security forces.

Dominic McGlinchey's victims included a caterer from Derry City who was employed at Fort George British Army base.

In March 1977 Dominic McGlinchey was allegedly part of a gang that killed 67-year-old Hester McMullan, a retired postmistress, in Toomebridge.

Dominic McGlinchey's repeated requests for more and more powerful arms were denied.

Dominic McGlinchey knew that their capture "would have been a major propaganda coup for the authorities".

Dominic 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.

Dominic McGlinchey wanted to kill the man but was persuaded against it.

In 1977, following a mailvan robbery, Dominic McGlinchey was arrested in County Monaghan for carjacking a Garda patrol vehicle and threatening the officer with a pistol, although Dominic McGlinchey claimed that the gun was actually a wheelbrace.

Dominic McGlinchey failed to make bail at Dublin's Special Criminal Court after a Garda Superintendent argued that McGlinchey would fail to attend court if bailed.

Dominic McGlinchey was convicted and sent to the Republic of Ireland's maximum-security Portlaoise Prison.

Dominic 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.

But, says Dillon, "the more Dominic McGlinchey considered the option of a political role, the less he was enamoured of the idea".

Dominic McGlinchey suspected he would dislike taking orders from a Sinn Fein manager, and even more so from one that "had never pulled a trigger".

An anonymous ex-volunteer told Dillon that "the prospect of being an armchair general didn't much appeal to [Dominic McGlinchey], considering the fact that he hated armchair generals".

Towards the end of his term, Dominic McGlinchey fell out with the IRA's prison leadership, particularly with the ex-Vice President of Sinn Fein, Daithi O Conaill, and the Dublin leadership generally, whom he called "armchair generals".

Dominic McGlinchey's defection was a "bitter blow" to McGuinness, say the latter's biographers, as he and McGlinchey had become close friends.

Dominic McGlinchey was released from Portlaoise in 1982, having nearly served five years, and made an "immediate impact" on his new organisation.

Dominic McGlinchey recruited both disaffected Provisionals and new people, and put an end to the group's intermittent internal feuding.

Dominic McGlinchey still respected McGuinness and when they met, McGlinchey assured him that he would not be against joint operations.

Dominic McGlinchey introduced the policy of "direct military rule" 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.

Dominic McGlinchey was now able to act without reference to the rest of the organisation when he chose.

Dominic 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'".

The target was the Droppin Well bar in Ballykelly, where, Dominic McGlinchey was advised, soldiers from the army base regularly drank.

Dominic McGlinchey instructed them to proceed with the bombing and to ensure maximum casualties.

Dominic McGlinchey knew, but ignored, the near-inevitability of civilian deaths.

The Ballykelly bombing encouraged the Irish court to reconsider its position: the following day, Ireland's Supreme Court ordered Dominic McGlinchey to be extradited to Belfast in response to an earlier RUC request for Dominic McGlinchey to be returned to them to face trial for the murder of Hester McMullan.

Public interest in Dominic 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 judgment".

In spite of secret surveillance south of the border, the Special Reconnaissance Unit had difficulty monitoring Dominic McGlinchey, argues the journalist Peter Taylor.

Dominic McGlinchey was believed to be bringing a bag of guns into the north.

Dillon posits that the army had a shoot-to-kill policy with regard to Dominic McGlinchey, believing him to be always heavily armed and unlikely to surrender without a fight.

The deaths of Grew and Carroll reinforced Dominic McGlinchey's conviction that there was a mole in the organisation with the sole intention of "setting up Dominic McGlinchey".

Six months after Grew and Carroll were killed, Dominic 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.

Dominic McGlinchey later said that the men originally said they wanted to speak to Dale "about guns or something that was missing".

Dominic McGlinchey told Claire that Dale would be returned to her shortly, and then emptied McMahon's car boot and bundled Dale into it.

Dominic 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.

Dominic McGlinchey was not to see Dale again; his body was found four days later outside Killean.

Dominic McGlinchey met his man in Dundalk and instructed him to return the gun, in exchange for assurances as to the volunteer's safety.

At the debriefing of the surviving volunteers, an attendee later recalled, Dominic McGlinchey "went mad and called us all stupid cunts".

Dominic McGlinchey was 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.

The INLA denied involvement and condemned the attack, although Dominic McGlinchey later acknowledged the presence of an INLA volunteer in the group to whom, Dominic McGlinchey admitted, he had loaned a Ruger rifle.

Dominic McGlinchey quickly acted to put distance between himself and the Darkley massacre.

Darkley was yet another propaganda disaster for the INLA, and whether Dominic McGlinchey liked it or not, symbolised what it was best known for.

Six days after the Darkley attack, Dominic McGlinchey gave an interview to the Sunday Tribune, conducted by its editor, Vincent Browne.

Dominic McGlinchey appears to have offered the BBC the opportunity to interview him first, but they declined.

Browne and Dominic McGlinchey talked for four hours, only being interrupted for occasional refreshment.

Browne realised that Dominic 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.

Browne discussed Dominic McGlinchey's preferred tactics on an operation, asking, for example, whether Dominic McGlinchey ever saw the face of his victim:.

Dominic 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 Dominic McGlinchey seemed uneasy in the interview, wrote Browne, was when he was asked about the children of Dominic McGlinchey's victims, to which he replied in generalities.

Dominic McGlinchey became agitated, saying that he refused to be "blackmailed by the grief of children".

Dominic McGlinchey showed no remorse for his activities, said Browne, only a "frightening indifference".

Dominic McGlinchey appealed the decision, questioning the constitutionality of the 1965 Act.

Dominic McGlinchey appointed a Newry man called "Jap" chief of staff during Dominic McGlinchey's enforced absence.

Dominic 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".

Dominic McGlinchey was released on parole to attend her funeral in Bellaghy.

Dominic McGlinchey was released by Belfast Appeal Court the following year.

The then-leader of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, later joked in Fortnight magazine that the Catholic Church was insistent that "although reports that Mr Dominic 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".

Dominic McGlinchey was handed back to the Gardai at the Killeen border crossing, and immediately re-arrested on charges relating to the Clare siege.

Dominic McGlinchey's 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.

Dominic McGlinchey was convicted at the Special Criminal Court in March 1986 for firearms offences from two years earlier.

Dominic McGlinchey was sent to Portlaoise for 10 years, where he became a model prisoner, immersing himself in the study of constitutional and extradition law, on which he became expert.

The Supreme Court advised Dominic McGlinchey to seek payment of the state aid paid to defence counsel as he was acting on his own behalf.

Dominic McGlinchey's appeals failed in Ireland and then in the European Court of Human Rights.

Dominic McGlinchey then appealed to the Supreme Court again, on the new grounds that the 1981 warrant from Belfast was flawed.

However, said Costello, there were sufficient safeguards in the extradition process to have allowed Dominic McGlinchey to have presented this evidence on an earlier occasion; he had not done so, and the appeal was therefore dismissed.

Dillon suggests that during this period of imprisonment, Dominic McGlinchey reconsidered the direction of his life, resolving to retire from military activity and become a family man.

Dominic McGlinchey, they knew, "had even less regard for the Adams leadership than the East Tyrone men".

Dominic McGlinchey was awakened and moved to another section of the prison, where he was given the news.

The Dominic McGlinchey children were taken into care by Brigid Makowski, who had previously been their legal guardian.

Mary's inquest was delayed three months as Dominic McGlinchey's counsel argued he had only been informed two days earlier and had not had sufficient time to instruct him.

Dominic McGlinchey is known to have taken an active part in McGlinchey's activities; the RUC wished to question her in the matter of 20 deaths, and had made enemies of her own, particularly by luring victims for her husband's execution squads.

Dominic 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 was still on-going.

Dominic McGlinchey's death put an end to the on-going contact between the INLA and the disaffected elements of the East Tyrone Brigade who had contacted McGlinchey.

In October 1992 Dominic McGlinchey applied for temporary parole in order to see his children over the public holiday, but the request had been turned down on security reasons.

Dominic McGlinchey announced his intention of refocussing the INLA's efforts on investigating the money laundering activities of the UVF and its connections with Irish gangsterism.

Dominic McGlinchey spent time with his children, taking them on holiday to the Aran Islands.

The attacker then drew a pistol, with a number of shots hitting Dominic McGlinchey; he was able to take cover in a shrubbery.

Coogan comments that one of Dominic McGlinchey's children ran after the car to take its number.

Dominic McGlinchey was kept under armed guard while recovering in hospital.

Notwithstanding his disowning of the INLA, Dominic McGlinchey, it seems, had scores to settle, for both the attack on him and the death of his wife.

Dominic McGlinchey had moved to Drogheda and was now living in near-anonymity; few of his neighbours were aware of his past.

Dominic McGlinchey was still involved with the movement ideologically and with McAliskey, he was working on a draft constitution for a united Ireland.

At around 9:30 on the evening of Thursday, 10 February 1994, Dominic McGlinchey had visited friends of his in Duleek Road, near his home, and dined there.

Dominic McGlinchey left around forty minutes later, intending to take a video back to a shop in Brookville, on the north side of town.

Dominic McGlinchey later described his father's demeanour that night as "agitated and emotionally upset".

Dominic McGlinchey's inquest was held in Drogheda two weeks later, suspended and then reopened in November 1996.

Bernadette McAliskey made a statement for the family, in which she condemned the Gardai's investigation into the Dominic McGlinchey's killing and suggested that the killers were two known UVF men from the north.

Dominic McGlinchey drove his car around the town and was known to us here.

Dominic McGlinchey's funeral was held on 13 February 1994 in Bellaghy, with no republican accoutrements.

Dominic McGlinchey was buried alongside Mary and their young daughter Maire.

Dominic McGlinchey's coffin was carried from the McGlinchey family home to St Mary's Church by pall-bearers who were swapped out from the crowd every 40-yards or so.

McGlinchey's sons carried the coffin for the final yards; comments Keane, "Dominic and Declan McGlinchey have seen more than most because of the troubles in Northern Ireland".

Dominic McGlinchey's grave had a flagpole next to it from which a Tricolour flew after the burial.

Dominic McGlinchey condemned the recent press coverage which had accused McGlinchey of drug dealing and criminality and said of the journalists responsible that they were.

Dominic McGlinchey's war was with the armed soldiers and the police of this state.

Dominic McGlinchey's thinking was just fundamentally democratic and to acknowledge that Dominic McGlinchey had an intellect was to acknowledge the reality of this conflict here.

The press coverage of Dominic 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 Dominic McGlinchey was different from the brand of Irish republicanism that was increasingly becoming part of mainstream political discourse.

Dominic McGlinchey was raised a Catholic and remained so for the rest of his life, although he described himself as a "believing one" rather than a practising one.

Dominic and Mary McGlinchey had two sons, Declan, born in 1978, and Dominic, who was a year younger.

Dominic McGlinchey was given what the Irish News described as a "paramilitary-style funeral", involving a masked colour party and a gun salute the night before.

Dominic McGlinchey has been critical of the party since, describing them as "not too different to that of any corporate company".

Dominic McGlinchey is involved in broader left-wing activism such as opposition to the Iraq War.

On his father's death, Dominic Og is reported as believing that McGlinchey was killed in order to remove a potential obstacle to the burgeoning Peace Process.

Dominic McGlinchey's death did not stop the INLA's internal feuding, and by this point, says Coogan, it had turned to drug dealing and racketeering.

Dominic McGlinchey had "helped keep the INLA on the map after the hunger strike", says Davies, and Holland and McDonald suggest that the INLA's fragmentation after his death indicates Dominic McGlinchey's importance to the organisation.

The scholar Arwel Ellis Owen has blamed Dominic McGlinchey for the INLA's subsequent descent into factionalism, which he argues was a direct result of Dominic McGlinchey's being on the run throughout his leadership.

Dominic McGlinchey's enforced absence, Owen suggests, prevented him from taking day-to-day control.

Dominic McGlinchey appears, therefore, to have had little interest in any form of struggle other than the military.

Dominic McGlinchey was commemorated in the INLA wing of the Maze Prison with a mural on a communal wall.

Dominic McGlinchey is portrayed in a black beret and against a fiery background and a silhouetted hillside.

Dominic McGlinchey had a tricolour tattoo on his left forearm.

Dominic McGlinchey 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".

O'Brien denied ever having an affair with Dominic 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".

Dominic McGlinchey's reputation, suggests the writer Jonathan Stevenson, became that of "fabled killer", while Coogan describes him as "a latter-day Ned Kelly", as committed to republicanism as Frances Hughes yet with far greater notoriety.

Dominic McGlinchey was, suggest Holland and McDonald, "probably the most famous and most charismatic INLA chief of staff since Seamus Costello".

Where Costello ruled by collective agreement, though, Dominic McGlinchey ruled by decree; his tenure as INLA chief of staff has been summed up as "brutal, authoritarian, but nonetheless still relatively cohesive" by researcher Gary Ackerman.

For example, when Adams ideologically linked the republican campaign to the ANC's struggles in South Africa against Apartheid, Dominic 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".

Dominic McGlinchey summed up his own approach as being "to do what had to be done and don't think about it thereafter".

The boy had joined the RUC and subsequently been killed by the IRA; "Dominic McGlinchey said he felt badly about that".

Dominic McGlinchey commented, for example, with regard to McGlinchey's views on informers, drugs, civilian casualties and sectarianism.

Dominic McGlinchey concludes that McGlinchey "was not a holy Joe, but his main targets were the British war machine".

Dominic 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.

One such fellow traveller of Dominic McGlinchey's later described the INLA leader thus:.

Dominic McGlinchey had a grasp of international politics and often discussed the agendas of other revolutionary movements.

Dominic McGlinchey wanted to see the INLA as part of an international socialist brigade.

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".

Ackerman has argued that the fact Dominic McGlinchey was able to spend so long on the run demonstrates the level of support he enjoyed in the countryside.

At his last trial, Dominic 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".

Holland and McDonald believed that Dominic McGlinchey would have known he would not meet with a peaceful death.

Similarities between McGreevy and Dominic McGlinchey include their wives having been killed previously, both being interned at a young age and both spending their lives on the run.

O'Brien's interviews with Dominic McGlinchey were themselves notorious, and demonstrated her willingness to court controversy.

Dominic McGlinchey countered that, while "he certainly played a strong part in the people that talked to me", McGreevy was a composite of many different men.

Morrison, though, argues that "some of McDonagh's information was derived from a highly inaccurate image of Dominic 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.

The central figure in Shane MacGown's 1997 song "Paddy Public Enemy No 1" is based on Dominic McGlinchey; when asked his opinion of him, MacGowan said "he was a great man".