Sinn Fein's response

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ably be able to put a name to McGlinchey's description.

Of the killings McGlinchey said: "They were entirely innocent hillbilly folk who had done no harm to anyone. There is no justification for the incident. I absolutely abhor the killing of these innocent people, there is no justification for it"

There would, he said, be ar INLA internal inquiry. He dic not, however, think that the mar likely to face execution 'because of the pressure the lad was under'.

Since the RUC had already connected the INLA to the kilthe hi was kes no necest ling by way oi the gun, tse raci the INLA link does not necessarily add credibility to his 'explanation' of it. More significant is the strange combination of strong words against the deed with tender regard for the man responsible - at the same time virtually identifying him.

The INLA, especially under MeGlinchey, is not usually a tender-minded organisation.

The Irish Times on November 24 carried a seemingly well-informed article by Andrew Pollak and Jim Cusack on McGlinchey and the present INLA. McGlinchey is not named, but there is little doubt as to is being talked about as 'the man'.

Pollak and Cusack tell the fol-. had mpreviously been voted on to the "Army Council' of INLA by its members, declared himself chief of staff. Within a short period he also imposed what was termed direct military rule, or 'DMR' DMR was apparently dreamed up as a regime by Republican prisoners some years ago. Under such a regime in a para. military grouping, the old rules of hearings and court martials for misdemeanours were done away with. Almost any indiscretion, from freelance theft to informing, is punishable by death without recourse to any form of appeal. The punishment is ordered by the chief of staff and carried out swiftly.

The last of the four men killed under the DMR system was Gerard Barkley, of Belfast, who was a high profile INLA member in Belfast. Former associates angered by his summary execution held a military funeral for him when his remains were returned to Belfast at the end of last month.

Barkley is known to have been lured from Belfast to Dundalk by the organisation's leader with the specific intention of killing him. He was unaware that this was the intention because in the previous set-up within the organisation the indiscretion of which he was accused, in this case carrying out a robbery on his own behalf, would have led to only a warning or a beating. new leader has reverted to the modus operandi popular with the Old IRA Flying Column and the South Derry • Brigade of sleeping rough in the country. side, emerging only for swift attacks. Such an operating style makes him and his small organisation very difficult to locate. at gunpoint"

In two years, the INLA has, therefore, gone from being an organisation with an estimated membership of between 150 and 200 to a group now estimated at containing no more than 20 forces. members who are centred around this new leader...

The INLA claimed in July, 1982, that... reorganisation had resolved an internal dispute which had led to the attempted assassination of two leading members of the IRSP, the brothers Sean and Harry Flynn, patrick. earlier that year.

In the second half of 1982, this reorganisation started to show itself in yet another stepping-up of INLA attacks, many of which were of a particularly reckless and indiscriminate nature. In June, an INLA bomb on the back of a parked motorcycle decapitated a 16-year-old south Belfast boy. In September two more young boys, along with a British soldier, died when an INLA pipebomb exploded in Divis Flats in west Belfast. at $25 a time!

Then last December it carried out its bloodiest attack to date, and the second worst atrocity in terms of the number of victims in 15 years of the Northern "Troubles' , when a bomb killed 11 off-duty soldiers and six civilians at a disco in a public house at Ballykelly, Co. Derry.

By this time, the INLA, and particularly its new and more stop. violent leadership in the Belfast area, had started to suffer the full brunt of the RUC's new strategy of using supergrass evidence to imprison paramilitary activists. From early 1982, half a dozen alleged INLA members had given information to Strabane. the RUC which led to charges against at least 50 of their erstwhile colleagues.

The most serious allegations were made by a former leading Belfast activist, Harry • Kirkpatrick, who last June was himself given concurrent life sentences for five murders and 72 other offences.

The Kirkpatrick affair forced military targets. anisation's Belfast membership to flee to the Republic, where earlier this year the former RA man from south Derry, nov based in the Dundalk/Castleblayney area, had forced the INLA's 'Army Council' to accept him as their new chief of staff One important part of the present 'INLA phenomenon' came out at a recent Belfast trial -the degree to which it is infiltrated by ltne State security Last week at Belfast Crown Court, Lord Justice Gibson dismissed charges brought against seven men on the testimony of 'supergrass' John Grimley, a former INLA leader. Two were released, but five still face other charges, including Harry KirkLord Justice Gibson described Grimley as a habitual criminal and a habitual liar. In the course of the trial it was revealed that Grimley, a long-time police informer, had been working for the RUC inside the INLA, which he had joined to do police work.

In the course of that work he had set up a unit of the INLA in Craigavon, turning over the names of those he recruited to the police and gathering or inventing information for then Relations between INLA and the Provos are now so strained that armed clashes may not be far away. A number of Armagh Catholic businessmen, kidnapped for ransom by INLA are said to have appealed to the Provisional IRA for protection.

The Provos told the INLA people that they would shoot them if the gangsterism didn't Two weeks ago Sinn Fein's assemblyman in Derry, Martin McGuinness, took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising and denouncing INLA for exploding no-warning car bomb outside a public house in 'While Sinn Fein supports the right of the Irish people to wage war on crown forces, we believe that Friday night's nowarning INLA car-bomb in Strabane is both militarily and politically indefensible. Nowarning car-bombs in residential areas do not distinguish between civilian and legitimate THE hypocritical howls of loyalist politicians which have followed the sectarian killings at Darkley in County Armagh are matched in insincerity only by the hand-wringing, guiltmongering of Irish establishment prelates and politicians.

The former want to use the tragic, indefensible, deaths as an excuse for extensive nationalist or Catholic blood-letting, whilst the latter want the whole nationalist population to take on the guilt of the act and capitulate to the British occupier to show true sorrow.

But the nationalist people of the North know better than anyone what it is to lose innocent relatives through sectarian assassination and understand better than anyone the grief of those bereaved at Darkley.

Because the truth of the matter is that sectarian murder has been the weapon of the loyalists seeking to maintain supremacy in the North, not the weapon of those who justifiably fight to free their people from foreign oppression.

The republican struggle has no part for the indiscriminate sectarian attack such as took place at Darkley, and republicans have not hesitated to say so. But that does not mean that republicans have to forget the constant sectarian war which has been carried out at various levels of intensity by loyalists in and out of uniform over the last 14 years; or the pogroms against the nationalist population which have taken place intermittently since the foundation of the Northern statelet; or indeed the centuries of sectarian hatred deliberately engineered by the Orange Order, set up for that very purpose by those in whose interests it is to create and maintain divisions.

It was apt that on Wednesday this week, a bereaved nationalist mother should, in the Irish News, criticise both James Prior and Cardinal O Fiaich over their flippant claims about Darkley from 'An Phoblacht' being the first attack on a place of worship.

Mrs Gretta Ballantine reminded them that her 18-year-old son, Kevin, was shot dead by loyalist gunmen in the porch of St. Brigid's Church in Belfast along with a friend, Gerard Kiely from Dublin, as they left evening Mass in February 1975 - a year when loyalist sectarian attacks took place almost dally during an IRA truce.

The people of St. Matthew's parish in the Short Strand are not likely to conveniently wipe from their minds the fact that their church has been a consant target of loyalist attack over decades _ and a memorial marksthe spot where a parishioner died in the '20s when loyalists attacked Mass-goers.

Nor are the people of Ballymurphy likely to forget their local priest, Fr. Mullen, who was shot dead by British paratroopers as he gave the last rites to another of their victims on internment day in August 1971..

And there was little or no outery then from those who howl or hint now:

"Croppie lie down!".

The nationalist people decry the Darkley killings and understand the grief of the bereaved because they know only too well what the evil of sectarianism is like. They are not foolish enough, however, to do as Prior, O Fiaich and the rest of them would like and accept the blame for it or pretend that history has not happened The blame for Darkley, as for all the other deaths in the North, ultimately rests with the British who created, armed and maintained the sectarian state in the North — a state which could not exist without officially sponsored sectarianism.

And the only answer remains for the British to get out, not for the nationalist people to capitulate to that sectarian monster either through fear or ill-placed guilt.

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Up and up - the megatonnage and US military spending Socialist Organiser, 1 December 1983 Pas

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