Dominic Óg McGlinchey: Irish Times Interview

McGlinchey Urges Dissidents to Consider Ending Armed Campaign: ‘I don’t see mass appetite at a street level for the armed campaign’

Gerry Moriarty
IrishTimes
22 April 2014

Senior republican Dominic Óg McGlinchey has called on dissident republicans to start 'a conversation about the removal of the gun from Irish politics.' He is the son of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey, two leaders of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and was present at their murders in Drogheda and Dundalk in 1994 and 1987.

'Republicanism is a very honourable thing if done in an honourable way. We shouldn’t be dishonouring it by the mindless use of violence' Mr McGlinchey said in a wide-ranging interview with The Irish Times.

Senior dissidents are facing trial while hundreds of others have been prosecuted by the PSNI and Garda in recent years. 'I haven’t said to anybody pack up and go home . . . what I am saying is that we should not be bound by the weapons. Just because they are there does not mean that they have to be used.'

Dominic Óg McGlinchey: 'There were things done that were unimaginable, not normal, but normal for people who lived in the occupied Six Counties ... I don’t see mass appetite at a street level for the armed campaign’

In further conversation yesterday, he deplored the Good Friday murder of former Continuity IRA commander Tommy Crossan in Belfast, while sardonically adding that the killing had 'little to do with the armed struggle.'

Pedigree

Mr McGlinchey, with a name and a pedigree that carries weight in dissident circles, is the most senior such republican to raise these questions with dissidents.

He resigned from Sinn Féin in 2007 in protest at the decision to support policing. He was also named in court as being the getaway driver in the 2009 dissident attack on Massereene British army base in Antrim in which British soldiers Patrick Azimkar and Mark Quinsey were murdered. He was interviewed by the PSNI about the attack. He denied any involvement.

He also claimed that his father, who was shot dead six months before the groundbreaking IRA ceasefire of 1994, was killed 'to facilitate the peace process.'

Those responsible, he contended, were one of three groups: the IRA, British military intelligence or people acting for the Irish government. Mr McGlinchey’s comments about dissident republicans seriously considering ending their campaigns of violence come as the various groups face severe pressure from the PSNI, the Garda and MI5.

‘I don’t see mass appetite at a street level for the armed campaign’

Dominic Óg McGlinchey has serious misgivings and questions to ask about the strategic, pragmatic and even moral purpose of the continuing dissident republican campaign of violence. He wouldn’t be in the “business of condemning the armed struggle” but says it’s “make your mind up time” for dissident groups.

'I don’t see mass appetite at a street level for the armed campaign,' he adds. 'If there was we would be having mass amounts of attacks.' He believes the various paramilitary groups must decide as to whether they take the paramilitary or political path. You can’t do both, he is certain. 'It’s evolve or die, because that is where we are at.'

A case in point, he feels, is Friday’s dissident feud murder in Belfast of former Continuity IRA commander Tommy Crossan. 'It’s terrible that anybody would be shot on a Good Friday evening, but when organisations lose direction and discipline that’s where you end up.'

McGlinchey recalls a conversation he had recently with a fellow republican.
I asked, is it possible for you to think for one second that you can build a republican movement without the use of the gun being at its core? And this person said of course it is. So then I said, well let’s engage in that process. Let’s start to have a conversation about the removal of the gun from Irish politics. Is that not what everybody wants? So how do you go about bringing together the people on the island, North and South, to establish a 32-county socialist republic? I firmly believe you have to take off the mask and go out there among the people and start that job.

McGlinchey was an admirer and supporter of Martin McGuinness but when he and Gerry Adams persuaded republicans to endorse policing in 2007 he quit Sinn Féin. 'It was too much to stomach.'

The son of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey, he was 16 and with his father when he was gunned down in Drogheda in 1994; aged 9 when his mother was shot in Dundalk in 1987 just after she had bathed him and his brother Declan. He and his brother after the killings of his mother and father were raised respectively in grandparental homes in Toomebridge, Co Antrim, and Bellaghy, Co Derry.

Parents

Dominic and Mary McGlinchey were leaders in the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), both ruthless and even labelled as psychopathic, with his father being called “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, but he rejects that depiction. What he strongly suspects is that six months before the 1994 IRA ceasefire Dominic McGlinchey was killed to “facilitate the peace process”. Those responsible, he contends, were one of three groups: the IRA, British military intelligence or people acting for the Irish government.

He’ll talk about his parents but first, and with a degree of circumspection, he wants to speak about dissident republican paramilitaries and how he feels they must engage in a debate about whether now is the time to call a halt to the violence.

We meet in Tuam, Co Galway, where 37-year-old McGlinchey is now living with his wife and three children. We speak for several hours over two days and he is cautious in his comments, elliptical by times, because he says you 'need to be careful because it is very dangerous out there.'

The danger he refers to can come from inside the dissident republican movement from people who won’t like what he is saying and, he believes, possibly from some outside dark forces as well – what Gerry Adams would describe as “securocrats”. But as he gradually opens up it becomes clear that behind all the qualifications he feels that the dissidents right now are going nowhere. He’s hard-headed but concedes that if dissidents – who no matter how weak are always capable of killing people – are not advancing their united Ireland cause by a single inch, then questions of morality as well as politics and paramilitarism come into play.

He feels compelled to get a debate going within the dissident organisations such as the “New IRA”, Óglaigh na hÉireann, Continuity IRA and the various sub-groups and factions.
I would never get into telling people what they should or shouldn’t do but what I would say is that republicans need to have respect and compassion for other republicans ... Republicanism is a very honourable thing if done in an honourable way. We shouldn’t be dishonouring it by the mindless use of violence. There needs to be strategy behind it and an end result in mind.

You need to explain to your people what that strategy is. Do you believe that you are going to drive the Brits into the sea? There is no sign of that happening. To resist has to be more than saying, ‘I can endure the most, I have enough in the tank, that I have this Irishness thing that you won’t beat me, that you can never beat the Irish’. There has to be more to it than that.
I haven’t said to anybody pack up and go home, I am not even saying it is time to dump weapons. What I am saying is that we should not be bound by the weapons. Just because they are there does not mean that they have to be used.”

McGlinchey says republicans had to sort out “how you walk in the world”. They had to decide between inhabiting 'dodging bullets territory, or building communities territory. You can’t be in the two places at the same time; it’s impossible.'

McGlinchey says it is an undeniable fact that the PSNI, Garda and MI5, in their terms, have had “massive” successes against dissidents.

Dissidents had to confront many serious questions, another one being, 'Is filling up the jails with republicans advancing the united Ireland cause?'

McGlinchey allows there is also a moral issue of continuing a campaign where there is little or no hope of achieving anything remotely close to republican goals. 'I think that every day of the week you should ask yourself, is what I am doing bringing me further down that road; is it a case that the use of armed struggle is forcing the Brits’ hand?'

But he says that while most people abhor and deplore killings such as the murders of the two British soldiers, Patrick Azimkar and Mark Quinsey, at Massereene in Antrim, and of PSNI officers Ronan Kerr and Stephen Carroll, that from a dissident “militaristic” perspective it has made a difference. Of the campaign of violence he says, 'Are we any closer to a united Ireland. Obviously we are not. Has it stopped or stifled an absolute and utter surrender from the republican movement, you would have to say yes.'

But now dissidents must face up to hard realities, he feels. McGlinchey observes how the PSNI and Garda have striven to ensure that in the crackdown on dissidents that no republican is killed.
They seem to be very anxious not to make a martyr of anybody. There is a new dispensation: the way the republican movement was built before was you went and looked into an open casket and you paid your respects and what you did was you lost one but you got 10 [new members]. So now what we have is we bring them up in front of the judiciary. You either put them away for life or you strip every single strand of republicanism from them: we’ll make them wear a tag; we’ll break them; make them plead guilty in a British court; ask them to swear never to immerse themselves in republican activity again: they are actually starting to take republicanism out of your DNA.
Dissidents

There is also the question of the blurring of the edges between dissident and criminal activity. He refers to cases of dissidents extorting money from drugs dealers – “if you pay me you can continue to poison your community” – and how such activity is “sullying” republicanism. He says there are too many people claiming to be republicans who 'should never have been allowed on the bus.'

McGlinchey believes that his father, who was killed in February 1994, just six months before the groundbreaking IRA ceasefire, was shot to help smooth the path to the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. 'There were no ballistics, no cars, no nothing. Everybody [involved] disappears off the face of the planet.'

His mother was murdered in 1987, almost certainly as part of an internal republican feud but he is convinced there was a strategic agenda to his father’s death, and that it wasn’t driven by some internal republican revenge motive. 'It’s sexy to blame some link from the past but the reality is that there is a high, high probability that he was killed solely to facilitate the peace process.'

By whom?
Either those who were working towards the peace; or you have got the Free State government; or you have got the British security services. The evidence is that on the island of Ireland there are only three groups who can make people disappear: it’s either the Free State government, the IRA or British intelligence, not unless the Israelis lent us Mossad for a night.

According to McGlinchey, his father, who had been released from prison in the South the previous year, was working for a very senior IRA figure at the time, investigating internal “corruption”. He says he subsequently learned that his father had become aware of a planned meeting in Co Louth between members of the IRA’s Dublin brigade and members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and that his father was determined 'to make sure that that problem would have been dealt with.'

McGlinchey says he met his father in Drogheda about an hour before his killing and was struck by the fact that he seemed agitated and emotionally upset.
I said to him, "What’s wrong with you; is the IRA going to kill you?" And he said, "I am just sick of my name being blackened by men who never fired a shot." I asked him again, "Is the IRA going to kill you?" And he said, "No, the IRA would never kill me, son." Within an hour he was dead.

'I was with him,' he recalls.
I informed him he had to make a phone call that night. And then he said to me, "The chip shop’s open, do you want to get chips?" I said "No, I have the dinner ready for you." You were always on edge. He used the phone box and then a car went flying by. I jumped out and shouted at him to run. I heard him shout, "Ah fuck." The shooting had started at that stage.

McGlinchey said if his father hadn’t been killed in the phone booth he would have been killed somewhere else in Drogheda that night, and that because he was with him in the car he too could have been killed. 'Whoever these people were had the clearance to go anywhere in Drogheda that night.'

In an interview with Vincent Browne, Dominic McGlinchey spoke of having killed some 30 people and of liking “to get in close” when attacking his victims. He’s been viewed as a cold-hearted psychopathic killer who ran an INLA organisation that frequently seemed more focused on murderous internal republican feuding than the “armed struggle”, while in contrast Bernadette McAliskey at his funeral said he was the “finest republican of them all”. No difficulty in figuring which view his son supports.
My father was the most genuine, caring individual you ever came across. There are more people walking around America today and walking around other places living because the plane ticket was bought for them rather than them being executed.

In 1987 he was living with his mother Mary and his brother Declan in Dundalk while his father was in prison. Their sister Maire had died as an infant from meningitis. His mother had just bathed the pair of them.

She was brushing the water out of my hair at the door of the bedroom when there was a big thud to the back door. My mother asked me what was that and I said Declan must have fallen in the bath. She went to have a look to see was he okay and that was when she must have seen the two men running up the stairs.

Shooting
She started shouting at them, "Don’t be shooting me in front of my children; take me outside, don’t let my children see this." They kicked her into the bathroom – I ran down the stairs. Her very last words were, "God forgive me." The rattling and the shooting started then. They shot her in front of my brother; his body was all burned with spark marks from the spray of the gunfire.

He adds:
My mother was a very good woman; she was very disciplined; she was very caring; she was a woman who certainly did not suffer fools. I would say that the security forces feared her as much as they feared my father.

He doesn’t elaborate on the trauma of such experiences. He’s said enough, made his point forcibly about the necessity for dissidents to consider quitting the stage and recalled hard stories about his parents. He finishes with a surprising comment:
I genuinely try to see the good in people ... I could sit and have a cup of tea with those people [that shot his mother]. Because whatever happened in the conflict we all become dehumanised, stripped of dignity and victims of ourselves, victims of the situation that we were born into. There were things done that were unimaginable, not normal, but normal for people who lived in the occupied Six Counties.


5 comments:

  1. Very powerful piece.

    Dissidents have pissed on a lot of previous articles from a multitude of other prominent republicans. Their contempt and disregard for even their own community and McGlinchey highlights the threat that the controlling hand of dissidents can pose to anyone who might speak out:

    "The danger he refers to can come from inside the dissident republican movement from people who won’t like what he is saying and, he believes, possibly from some outside dark forces as well – what Gerry Adams would describe as “securocrats”."

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  2. Again, Dominic has earned the right to say what he's saying. Given that he actively pursues the debate within the circles he is preaching to, simultaneously exploring and proposing alternative means to take the struggle forward. He will be feeling a cold wind, unjustifiably in my opinion. This is the right way to say stop, if that is what people feel.

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  3. I actully believe dominic is right north and south the jails are full while we have little or no miltary success to show for it.There is a lot of mistrust between different factions some justifed at present .If anti treaty republicanism is to have a future we should take the armed campain off the table for the time being and build a unifed republican movement.This would take the mrico groups agenda away from our oppents and give us the room to put a long term strategy in place that may or may not mean an armed campain either way it has to be better than were we are now.

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  4. Dominic Óg is feeling the same frustration the majority of Republicans are feeling as we watch one group go here and another go over there without direction.

    The present time is ripe for Republicanism given the Tory cuts and the Provo treachery. But the gun and the refusal to come together is our greatest obstacle to unity.

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  5. not very long ago someone on the quill, or on fb posted a comment about the futility of the armed struggle in what is called the troubles and likened the pira campaign as the equivalent of giving guns to fianna failers. That may be true and Dominic Og's comments may be correct. I'm glad he put the Irish government up there in the culpability for his parents murders, and the subsequent coverups along with the other probable co-conspirators. Nobody does dirty wars as dirty as the British government and with all their resources and experience it was naive to think that an eclectic group of people could effect a real revolution in 1970, or 1916, or 1798, no matter how much the status quo is affected. The post rebellion regimes seems no better and in many ways worse than the regimes that they replaced. We had the Gorta Mor after the Union, we had free state cronyism after land distribution of the late 1880's, and we're beginning to see the real negative dividends to the so called peace process, social and economic. The ideals of republicanism are laudable but it's naive to expect those ideals alone to translate into power in the face of such organized and determined opposition. Also each of our armed struggle have been little more than symbolic, each time effecting cosmetic change while effecting huge individual suffering and sacrifice. That's not to condemn it because it seems inevitable as long as there's injustice. It should be borne in mind also that outside of republicanism there has always been indigenous recourse to violence, against the state as well as being often self destructive, as directed by various secret societies. Wishful thinking will not remove violence and suffering from our politics or our living histories. The only chance we have of really breaking the bounds of the cycle is in massive almost universal awareness of injustice and inequities in Ireland on a person by person basis. Good luck with that and start opening the celtic madrases, with women to the fore.

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