Irish National Liberation Army to announce weapons decommissioning
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/06/irish-national-liberation-army-decommission
Republican paramilitary group responsible for Droppin' Well pub
attack and killing of MP Airey Neave has laid down arms
David Batty
6 February 2010
A republican paramilitary group which killed more than 120 people
during the Troubles in Northern Ireland is set to announce it has
decommissioned its weapons.
The move by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) is expected to
be confirmed by the body overseeing Northern Ireland's paramilitary
weapons decomissioning.
The INLA was responsible for some of the worst attacks of the
Troubles, including the killing of Conservative MP Airey Neave in 1979.
A republican source claimed the decommissioning happened in recent
weeks. "The announcement is expected on Monday," he said.
Four months ago the INLA said its "armed struggle is over" and vowed
to end its 35-year campaign of violence in Northern Ireland.
The group was behind one of Northern Ireland's worst atrocities when
it killed 17 people in a bomb attack on the Droppin' Well pub in
Ballykelly, County Londonderry, in 1982.
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IRA splinter group disarms; no apology for carnage
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jUgCOnWc4fnfSbHugIp0L95CWk4QD9DO2AM00
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK (AP)
2/8/10
DUBLIN A ruthless IRA splinter group, the Irish National Liberation
Army, declared Monday it had fully disarmed but offered no regrets
for committing some of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict.
"We make no apology for our part in the conflict," said INLA
spokesman Martin McMonagle, who spent seven years in prison for
plotting to plant bombs in England and assassinate Northern Ireland's
senior Protestant politicians.
Northern Ireland's disarmament chief, retired Canadian Gen. John de
Chastelain, confirmed he and other officials had received and
destroyed Irish National Liberation Army guns, ammunition, explosives
and bomb parts. In a statement he said INLA officials who have
observed a shaky cease-fire since 1998 had said the weapons
represented their entire arsenal.
The general also confirmed that a long-dormant faction, the Official
Irish Republican Army, recently handed over its modest stockpile of
guns. The Officials were the first IRA faction to call a cease-fire,
in 1972, but remained a racketeering and money-laundering force in
working-class Catholic parts of Belfast.
De Chastelain declined to provide further details in keeping with his
clandestine efforts since 1997 to persuade all Northern Ireland's
underground armies to surrender weapons.
He already has confirmed the disarmament of the most elaborately
armed group, the Provisional IRA, in 2001-2005, followed by the
province's two major British Protestant paramilitary groups, the
Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, in June 2009
and January 2010, respectively.
The Anglo-Irish legislation that empowered de Chastelain to collect
weapons expires Tuesday in Northern Ireland and Feb. 23 in the
Republic of Ireland. After that, anyone caught with paramilitary
weapons likely faces prison time.
De Chastelain and his largely Finnish and American staff are expected
to shut their offices in Belfast and Dublin after publishing a final
progress report to the British and Irish governments later this month.
The only paramilitary gangs still committed to keeping weapons are
two small anti-British factions, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA,
which reject Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord. Both groups still
mount occasional bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland.
Leaders of Sinn Fein the IRA-linked party that is the major Irish
Catholic voice in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government with
Protestants said the INLA move underscored that today's dissident
violence is futile.
"The peace process has ensured that a peaceful and democratic path to
a united Ireland exists. There is no appetite for armed actions
within the (Irish) republican community," said Sinn Fein justice
spokesman Gerry Kelly, who led the Provisional IRA's first car-bomb
attacks on London, in 1973.
The Irish National Liberation Army was formed in 1974 by Official IRA
members unhappy with their cease-fire. Like all IRA factions, it
hoped to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom against the
will of its majority Protestant population.
It sought to distinguish itself by preaching a strict faith in
Marxism and by upstaging the Provisional IRA with the callousness
of its violence. The INLA attacked targets the much larger group
couldn't, or wouldn't.
In 1982 the INLA, in its deadliest strike, killed 11 British soldiers
and six civilians by bombing a Northern Ireland disco in a Protestant
village. The following year it machine-gunned a rural Protestant
gospel hall, killing three worshippers and wounding seven.
In all, the group killed more than 120 people. Since the late 1980s,
the majority of its victims have been rival criminals and its own
members caught in a cycle of internal feuds.
The two INLA veterans who announced Monday's disarmament said all the
bloodshed had been necessary in pursuit of political aims they never
came close to achieving.
INLA representative Willie Gallagher whose own brother was shot
through the back of the head by INLA rivals in 1996 said its
killings "were necessary in the conflict and our prosecution of the war."
He and McMonagle rejected British journalists' calls to apologize for
the assassination of World War II hero Airey Neave, the Northern
Ireland adviser to then-Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher.
Neave, 63, bled to death after a bomb exploded under his car in the
British Parliament parking lot in March 1979, weeks before Thatcher's
rise to power.
Gallagher described Neave famed as the first British soldier to
escape from the Nazis' Colditz prison as "an enemy combatant and a
casualty of war."
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Extremist group born out of bloody feud
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0209/1224264030150.html
February 9, 2010
DEAGLÁN DE BRÉADÚN
BACKGROUND: The INLA has a long history of extreme violence and
vicious internal feuding
THERE WAS a faded black-and-white photograph of the late Séamus
Costello (1939-'77) on the wall at the press conference in downtown
Belfast where the news that the Irish National Liberation Army had
decommissioned a "substantial" quantity of weapons was announced.
Costello was a militant republican who split from the "Official" IRA
in 1974 because of his perception that his erstwhile associates had
gone soft on Irish unity and taken a reformist course on social issues.
He founded the INLA and its political counterpart, the Irish
Republican Socialist Party. Three years later he was shot dead, in
the course of a bitter armed feud with his former comrades, but his
name lives on as an icon of the INLA and the IRSP.
His memory was invoked by one of the speakers at yesterday's press
conference but it was somewhat unfortunate that his name was
pronounced American-style as "Cost ello ", with the emphasis on the
second syllable instead of the first.
Costello, who was well-known in political and media circles, would
have been unperturbed by the mispronunciation but it is a safe bet
that, as a traditional left-republican, he would have been appalled
at some of the dark corners into which the INLA strayed since his
assassination.
Originally intended to be more militant than the Officials and more
socialist than the Provisionals, the INLA became associated over the
years with criminality and internal feuding.
Set up in late 1974, the group was known initially as the People's
Liberation Army. Its foundation was accompanied by a deadly conflict
with former associates in the Official IRA who sought to snuff out
their new rival at birth, as some suggested they should have done
five years earlier with the Provisionals. The most prominent victims
of the feud were Belfast Official IRA commander Billy McMillen, who
was shot dead on April 28th, 1975, when out shopping with his wife,
and later Costello himself, who was killed while sitting in his car
on the North Strand Road in Dublin on October 6th, 1977.
Missing Costello's radical input, as seen in his campaign to keep the
beaches of Wicklow open to the public, the INLA drifted into pure
militarism. It drew world headlines with its assassination of Airey
Neave, wartime escapee from Colditz prison and Tory spokesman on
Northern Ireland, who died when a bomb activated by a mercury
tilt-switch exploded under his car as he drove out of the Palace of
Westminster car park on March 30th, 1979.
Another INLA founder-member, Ronnie Bunting, a Protestant republican
and son of Ian Paisley's early associate Major Ronald Bunting, was
shot dead by loyalists in 1980, along with his colleague Noel Lyttle.
University lecturer and IRSP activist Miriam Daly was shot dead the same year.
The INLA's most deadly action was the bomb attack on the Droppin'
Well Bar at Ballykelly, Co Derry, on December 6th, 1982, in which 11
British soldiers and six civilians were killed.
Three INLA men, Patsy O'Hara, Kevin Lynch and Michael Devine, were
among the 10 hunger-strikers who died in the Maze Prison H-Blocks in 1981.
The Irish People's Liberation Organisation (IPLO) split from the INLA
in 1986 and another deadly feud ensued. In December 1997, three INLA
prisoners assassinated loyalist Billy Wright in the Maze prison. Four
months after the Belfast Agreement of Good Friday 1998, the INLA
declared a ceasefire because there was "now no basis for armed
struggle". However, as recently as June 2008, the INLA was blamed for
the killing of pizza delivery-man Emmet Shiels in Derry. The North's
Independent Monitoring Commission stated in its latest report last
November that the organisation was deeply involved in serious crime,
notably extortion.
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