Dominic McGlinchey: Remembering the 'bloodstained' legacy of top Provo and INLA leader who was murdered 30 years ago this weekend

Dominic McGlinchey had been a significant player in the Provisional IRA.

His brother Sean was a member too – he was convicted of murdering six Protestant civilians in the 1973 bombing of Coleraine town centre, and is currently a Sinn Fein councillor – while McGlinchey's wife Mary was an INLA member who was killed in Dundalk in 1987 by persons unknown.

McGlinchey had been caught and released on-and-off over a 20 year period in both the Republic and Northern Ireland.

He initially served an 18 month jail term in 1973 for gun possession, after which he went on to take control of the south Co Londonderry wing of the IRA.

He was wanted by police for questioning over a raft of shootings and bombings (including the killing of two RUC constables near Moneymore in 1977), and security force members nicknamed him Mad Dog – a sobriquet that would later be applied to UDA brigadier Johnny Adair.

Sometime in the early 1980s he fell out with the IRA and joined the INLA, soon rising to become its leader.The book Lost Lives, which lists those killed in the Troubles, devotes some three pages to him (an unusually-long entry) detailing a number of killings that were believed to be either carried out by him personally or on his orders. They include:

Suspected informer Eric Dale; petty thief Gerard Barkley; RUC reservist Colin Carson; south Armagh men Eamonn McMahon and Patrick Mackin who were tortured and shot after it was rumoured they cheated the INLA out of money; 63-year-old Protestant civilian Hester McMullan who was shot in a drive-by attack on her home; and 17 people (11 soldiers and six civilians) blown up in the Ballykelly bombing.

Under his watch the group also machine-gunned a Protestant prayer meeting in the hamlet of Darkley in Co Armagh in 1983, although McGlinchey claimed to disapprove of this attack because the three fatal victims were harmless "hillbilly people".

Lost Lives quotes from an interview McGlinchey did with the Sunday Tribune in 1983 in which he admitted killing around 30 people.

It is not known who eventually shot him dead at a phone box in Drogheda on February 10, 1994.

His last words were said to have been: "Jesus, Mary, help me."

Martin McGuinness carried his tricolour-draped coffin, as did feminist icon Bernadette Devlin / McAliskey (one of the founders of the INLA's political wing the IRSP), who described him as "the finest republican of them all".

Robert Sargent said his legacy is a “bloodstained” one.

Robert’s father Billy was killed in a random sectarian shooting in 1992 by one of the INLA’s splinter groups, the IPLO, and he also recalls Darkely “as clear as a bell” when the INLA “just sprayed the hall with gunfire while they were worshipping God”.

• WATCH – IPLO murder 30 years on: Random Protestant victim Billy Sargent had survived Nazi machine gun attack only to be shot while having a pint

McGlinchey’s “gloating” claim of 30-plus deaths “was quite sick, twisted and disturbing,” and “it does get you a bit when you see people attempting, in some absurd way, to glorify something like that”.

Ultimately, Robert concluded: “Words just fail me. He isn’t even worth thinking about.”