To a radical right-wing Unionist and born again Christian like me, the death of one of the most ruthless republican terrorists in 1994 might seem like a cause for celebration.
However, as a born again Christian since the age of 12 in January 1972, Dominic McGlinchey’s death in the Irish republic at the age of 39 has ironically left me with many spiritual questions.
This may sound very strange given the words of Jesus to his disciple Peter as told in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew chapter 26 and verse 52. When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter cut the ear of one of the men arresting Christ. Matthew states: “Put your sword back in its place, Jesus said to him, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” (New International Version, NIV)
In Christian theology, this is mainly interpreted that those who resort to violence, will eventually die violently. Given McGlinchey’s track record of violent republican activities, and especially the number of killings he was involved in, many Christians could be forgiven for thinking that McGlinchey got what he deserved.
This is especially the theological point given that during his time as Chief of Staff of the INLA, the organisation - directly or indirectly - was behind one of the most vicious sectarian massacres in the history of the Irish Troubles - the 1983 republican attack on the Pentecostal Mission Hall at Darkley in south Armagh.
Three men died and others were wounded in the gun attack and others were wounded in what is viewed in pro-Union circles as part of the ethnic cleansing of the Protestant border community. Darkley has become synonymous with naked sectarian hatred.
While McGlinchey was not directly involved in the massacre, one of the guns used by the attackers was reportedly an INLA weapon. While McGlinchey publicly condemned the massacre, many in the pro-Union community have dismissed his comments as mere empty rhetoric.
What could be more sectarian and a bigger example of ethnic cleansing than massacring Protestants as they met for Sunday worship? While Darkley was a Pentecostal place of worship within Protestant theology, rumours still abound in the pro-Union community that the gunmen mistook the Mountain Lodge hall for a Free Presbyterian Church - the denomination founded in 1951 by Rev Ian Paisley, the leader of the DUP and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in 1983.
To many in the Christian community, McGlinchey’s death was God’s justice on him for his part, albeit a minor one, in the Darkley massacre.
So it would be easy to initially dismiss McGlinchey’s death as punishment from God. But 10 February 1994, the date of his death, has never left my mind.
That day, I was on a freelance regional journalist shift at the BBC’s Belfast newsroom. It was part of my rehabilitation into frontline journalism following my participation in the controversial Channel Four Dispatches programme of October 1991, The Committee, which probed allegations of collusion between loyalist death squads and British security forces.
The Troubles were still ongoing in 1991 and collusion was still seen as a taboo subject for journalists, especially someone like me from the Protestant and Unionist community.
I had become the story as to why I had helped make the programme. I only was able to remain in Northern Ireland thanks to my dad, the late Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, then a UUP councillor on Ballymena Borough Council, using his own personal back channels with the RUC.
In February 1992, about two years to the day before the death of McGlinchey, I had to leave my post as editor of the Carrickfergus Advertiser and East Antrim Gazette weekly newspaper in Co Antrim and joined the Sandown Group of private nursing homes as its director of public relations.
While I had no desire to pursue a career in public relations in early 1992, it was a necessary evil to allow the political heat from the Dispatches programme to cool. By February 1994, I was back in journalism again, mainly lecturing part time in media and journalism at the then Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education and had joined the freelance register for BBC Northern Ireland - a post I had done in late 1981 when I entered full time journalism.
It was back to basics for me, but it was back in journalism. In the early Eighties during my time with the BBC, I had specialised in the overnight shift. So I was quite content to get this shift work back again.
My shift began at 11 pm that night. There were only a few of us in the newsroom and I was hoping and praying for a quiet night in terms of violence as I had been lecturing that day. Maybe, I thought, if I got the early morning bulletins and summaries written if there was no Troubles activity, I could get some time to prepare some lectures as the 1993/94 academic session was my first in lecturing.
But it was not to be. Shortly before midnight, word came in about a fatal shooting in the Irish Republic. Then the newsroom erupted in a frenzy; word had come through that the victim was none other than Dominic McGlinchey. The newsroom went into hyper drive with national and specialist correspondents joining us regional reporters in piecing the story together.
What was initially disturbing about the reporting process is that we seemed to be more concerned about who had shot McGlinchey, not the fact that his teenage son was with him at the time.
While eye witnesses were interviewed about what they had seen or knew about the killing, it was almost an after thought to put in the story that a young lad had witnessed the brutal murder of his dad. Then again, given the brutality of the Troubles, it was not unusual for such horrific tragedies to be witnessed by young people.
There was much discussion among the newsroom team through the night about who was responsible and conspiracy theories were the order of the evening.
However, as my shift drew to a close around 7 am the following morning, it was a claim by a female who went to McGlinchey’s aid as he lay dying which has always both stuck in my mind and troubled me.
The local woman said McGlinchey’s last words were: “Jesus, Mary help me.” Speculation in the newsroom was that McGlinchey was calling out to his late wife, Mary, who had been shot dead herself on 31 January 1987 in front of her children in her home in Dundalk.
While debate still surrounds what his actual last words were, news bulletins were carrying reports at the time that these four words were indeed his last words. These words are also confirmed in the prominent history of the Troubles entitled Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles on Page 1346 for entry 3457 Dominic McGlinchey.
Others speculated the ‘Mary’ he was referring to was the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, and a central figure in Christian, and especially Catholic theology. Mary holds a higher position in Catholic theology than Protestant theology. In the former she is regarded as Mary, Queen of Heaven.
Whilst McGlinchey is regarded in the pro-Union community as a committed republican socialist terrorist, he was buried in his native Bellaghy after a traditional Catholic requiem Mass at St Mary’s Church. If he was such a committed republican terrorist, why was he given a religious funeral? This has always been a theological bone of contention in Protestant circles.
The Catholic Church has been very critical of republicanism through the generations, yet gives dead terrorists a full blown traditional funeral as it would ordinary Catholics.
However, this has not been the key issue which has puzzled me over the decades since McGlinchey’s death. Put bluntly, could one of Ireland’s most notorious killers of the Troubles be in heaven because he called out to Jesus as he died? After that BBC newsroom shift that February 1994, it was a long, slow drive back to my then home in Glynn village near Larne as the pondered the scriptural meaning of those reported last words.
The basis of this theological dilemma stems from the crucifixion of Christ Himself by the Romans at Calvary. Two thieves were also crucified alongside Christ, but while one mocked him, the other asked Christ to remember him.
This passage which has sparked the debate is found in the New Testament in Luke’s Gospel Chapter 23 beginning at verse 39:
One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: ‘Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God?’ He said, ‘since you are under the same sentence?’ We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserved. But this man has done nothing wrong. Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. (New International Version, NIV).
While he is not mentioned in the Bible by name, many Biblical scholars suggest the name of this repentant thief was Dimas or Dysmas. What is significant is that he called out to Jesus for mercy - in the same way as McGlinchey called to Jesus with his last words.
In modern Christian theology, this act of calling out to Jesus for repentance, help or mercy, is known as a death bed conversion. Based on this portion of scripture, and taking the female witness’s account of McGlinchey’s last words, the former INLA Chief of Staff is now in heaven, not condemned to damnation in hell for his sins, given that the sixth commandment as given to Moses in the Old Testament is ‘thou shalt not kill.’ (Exodus Chapter 20, verse 13, King James Version).
Some may suggest that because of the terrorist atrocities which McGlinchey committed, there is no way that such a killer would be in heaven. However, to deny this concept is to deny the salvation of Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul, one of the great Christian writers of the Bible.
When he was Saul of Tarsus, he was one of the biggest hunters of Christians until his conversion to Christianity as he travelled to Damascus. The key verses for Paul’s (then Saul's) Road to Damascus experience are found in Acts Chapter 9 verses 3 to 9, where a blinding light from heaven appears, he falls, hears Jesus asking why he persecutes Him, and is told to go into Damascus, where he'll be instructed, resulting in three days of blindness before Ananias meets him. The event also appears in Acts 22:6-11 and Acts 26:12-18, offering slightly different accounts, but the same core message of divine revelation and transformation.
A Road to Damascus conversion is a key theme in Salvationist theology in Christianity. Given that McGlinchey called out to Jesus, did the former INLA boss have such a religious conversion in the moments before he died?
Both my late father and father in law were clerics and both were present with various parishioners when they became born again believers hours, even minutes, before dying, hence the phrase in Christian theology, death bed conversion.
And given Paul’s past as a violent hunter and persecutor of Christians, there is no reason to doubt how God forgave the violent background of McGlinchey if, indeed, he did call out to Jesus as he lay dying. As with Paul, his violent background did not hinder his conversion and ultimately his admission to heaven after death.
What has to be established in this part of the McGlinchey story is the accuracy of what his last words were. Some have disputed if ‘Jesus Mary help me’ were his last words.
It was a question I wanted to ask a relative of McGlinchey’s, Paul McGlinchey, during the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly campaign. My dad was re-elected to Stormont on the seventh count for the Ulster Unionist Party, but Paul McGlinchey, standing as an Independent Republican candidate, failed to get elected.
Put bluntly, if Dominic McGlinchey did genuinely issue this call to Jesus, then the bitter medicine which many in the Christian community must swallow, is that he is in heaven. Just as the thief on the cross was saved by Jesus, so too, was the former Chief of Staff of the INLA.
The concept of violent people in heaven is not a new debate in Christianity. One of the most contentious stories I ever wrote during my time as Northern Political Correspondent for the Irish Daily Star came in December 2007 in an article marking the 10th anniversary of the death of loyalist terrorist Billy Wright in 1997 inside the Maze Prison.
What’s the links, you may ask. It was the INLA who killed Wright inside the prison; the same terror group that McGlinchey was once Chief of Staff.
Like McGlinchey, there is speculation that Wright may also be in heaven. Wright was once terror boss of the notorious Mid Ulster brigade of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which was responsible for dozens of deaths in that region.
Wright later fell out of favour with the UVF’s Belfast leadership and formed the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force. He was LVF boss at the time of his death.
However, before Wright got involved with terrorism, my Christian sources have told me he was an evangelist and a committed born again Christian, who even carried out Christian outreach in the Irish republic.
A controversial pastor said to me in an interview published on December 4, 2007: “I believe Billy Wright is in heaven right now - perhaps even sat next to the repentant thief who died on a cruel Roman cross next to Christ on the day of crucifixion.”
This is slightly different to the supposed McGlinchey conversion, as this would be a view on Salvation that ‘once saved, always saved’ no matter how sinful the person has become.
The death of McGlinchey, like Wright’s, has produced many conspiracy theories. The biggest debate surrounding both terrorists is the eventual destination of their souls.
As a born again Christian myself, I believe in Salvation and that although I am not, and never will be, a perfect Christian, I know according to my faith that I will be re-united with my late parents and grand parents in heaven when I die.
It will be one of the great ironies of theology that as I dander around heaven, two people will come up to me - Dominic McGlinchey, the once feared republican terrorist, and Billy Wright, the once feared loyalist terrorist.
In the meantime, I have at long last decided to follow in my late father’s footsteps and become a preacher of the Gospel. I am now an Accredited Preacher with the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) with my Service of Recognition, or graduation, taking place in September 2024 in First Antrim Presbyterian Church.
I am currently working on a sermon entitled God’s Assurance of Salvation. I must admit as I put the sermon together, those four last words of McGlinchey are constantly running through my mind.
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| Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. |
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