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.
