Costello claimed that the new party had 300 members, including 120 in Belfast. The most high-profile recruit was Bernadette McAliskey, née Devlin, who had won a famous by-election victory in Mid-Ulster to enter Parliament in 1969. To her admirers, the fiercely militant McAliskey was known as the Irish Joan of Arc. To the Unionists she appeared a ‘mini-skirted Castro’. Her new party’s stated intention to end British imperialist rule could have left few in doubt that, like Sinn Fein, the IRSP would have a military wing. This was confirmed a few days after the press conference when a group of previously Official IRA prisoners in Long Kesh announced that they had formed a branch of the IRSP in the gaol. A unit of the Officials in the Divis Flats on the Falls Road also deserted to join INLA, bringing their weapons with them. In the weeks that followed, rivalry between the Officials and INLA descended into intra-sectarian violence and the murderous fury intensified down the years.
Initially, the new organisation developed along lines that suited Neave’s intelligence-based analysis: a ‘revolutionary socialist alternative’ (in McAliskey’s words) willing to ‘organise the people’s defence’ (in Costello’s words). But with the announcement of a Provisional ceasefire in February 1975, the violence turned inward on the republican movement, with shootings in bars and killings in disputed areas of Belfast. The existence of INLA could no longer be denied, though Costello attempted to do so in Belfast later that month. For public consumption, it was admitted only that the IRSP had people ‘militantly sympathetic’ to its aims. Not until April 1975 did black-clad members of the ‘People’s Liberation Army’ appear in public at the funeral of one of their ‘staff officers’. The IRSP registered itself as a political party in May, in Dublin, and claimed 400 members. At its annual conference, Costello praised the Communist insurgents in Vietnam whose war against the Americans was on the point of victory, and promised a ‘broad front’ of policy embracing small farmers, workers and the unemployed. But the party’s armed wing was now openly in conflict with the RUC and the army, particularly in Londonderry where the INLA had a hundred members and a lethal armoury. In January 1976, INLA began claiming responsibility for its actions, by which time it had already killed at least twelve people, including soldiers and policemen, and injured dozens more. Its deadly intent was no longer in question. The Starry Plough published photographs of INLA men parading inside Long Kesh, and finally in December 1976 admitted the ‘recent formation’ of an armed wing whose aim was to end British imperialist rule and create an all-Ireland socialist republic.
Although INLA pledged to intensify operations against ‘the enemy’, it was at its least active in the following year. It murdered an army private in Belfast but a bid to kidnap the West German consul failed. The year 1977 also saw the assassination of Seamus Costello on 5 October in Dublin by the Provisional IRA. For a time, his murder threatened to bring about the collapse of the splinter military group and its political front. However, INLA’s international contacts were now bearing fruit. They had always sought links with similar groups in Europe, and as early as 1975 the party toured Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland on a five-week trip organised by the West German – Ireland Solidarity Committee. One member of this shadowy body, Rudolf Raab, also belonged to the anti-NATO paramilitary outfit, Revolutionary Cells. Historians of INLA say that Raab provided the IRA breakaway group with links to F18, the intelligence section of Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatah wing of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.1
During 1977, this link-up yielded the first shipment of arms from the Palestinians. It brought rifles and Soviet- and Chinese-manufactured grenades, and for the next three years a steady stream of mainly Eastern bloc weaponry came overland by car and then by sea ferry to Northern Ireland. The great coup came in the summer of 1978, when two INLA members smuggled in a supply of Russian explosives behind the door panels of a van. Their lethal cargo comprised around eighty small batches of mixed penthrite and tolite, about the size of a bar of soap, pink in colour and packaged in Cellophane. The 8-ounce blocks were already fitted with holes for detonators. A further delivery brought two large blocks weighing about 5 lb. This destructive materiel, say INLA’s historians, was extremely rare and hard to find in Western Europe. It was perfectly suited to the paramilitaries’ favourite anti-personnel device, the under-car booby trap bomb. Its deadly impact could be directed upwards by newspaper packing, concentrating its force so that less explosive need be used. Furthermore, it was impossible to spot in the security scanners of the day, making it an extremely versatile weapon.
In May 1978, the Starry Plough published pictures of INLA ‘volunteers’ training in the hills, and again in September, with the headline ‘Republicans, Socialists Launch OFFENSIVE’. An article on the same page accused the Israelis of creating a ‘Jewish Ulster’ for the Palestinians and sympathised with their struggle. It was also clear that Airey Neave was building himself into a hate figure for the IRSP. In the same edition of the Starry Plough, the party’s chairperson, Miriam Daly, observed that Neave had ‘built his career’ on an escape from Colditz POW camp, whereas INLA member Jake McManus who escaped from Long Kesh ‘concentration camp’ in 1976 had been gaoled for a further two years and was on the blanket protest in H3 Block. By mid-1978, there were more than two hundred prisoners ‘on the blanket’ – wearing a blanket instead of prison clothes and smearing their excrement on the walls of their cells. Twenty-seven of them were INLA members and Miriam Daly insisted: ‘Successful escape from a Special Category Compound is not a crime.’ The IRSP – INLA were getting anxious about Neave, not only for his increasingly belligerent demands for tougher military action in Northern Ireland, but also because they feared that his understanding of POW mentality and escape and evasion gave him a unique insight into the minds and attitudes of republican inmates of the H Blocks. Their role in the development of the political and military struggle was massively underestimated outside the movement, and Neave’s grasp of this undervalued dimension to republican terrorism marked him out even more as a target. Neave was also on the wanted list of the Provisional IRA. It became clear that the family home, the Old Vicarage in Ashbury, Oxfordshire, had been staked out by the Provisionals, a plan of the property having been found in the possession of the IRA Balcombe Street gang after they gave themselves up following a six-day siege in a London council flat in December 1975. Neave was forced to move. ‘They [the IRA] had plans of various homes, and ours was one of them,’ said his daughter Marigold. ‘We were always moving, never in one place for very long. I think he found it quite difficult to be in one place.’ The family lived at various times in Lockinge, Brightwell cum Sotwell, Grove, near Wantage, and Compton Beauchamp. They also moved from flat to flat in London, ending up at Westminster Gardens in Marsham Street.
With its new armoury of Palestinian weapons, INLA was ready to strike. It boasted that, whereas the Provos had five men for every gun, they had five guns for every man. But the group’s technical capability was yet not matched by professional proficiency. They might call themselves an army of liberation but they were woefully ill-trained in the use of the sophisticated means at their disposal. Sniping attacks on the regular army in Belfast failed to claim lives. A plot to assassinate Sir Robin Haydon, British ambassador to Ireland, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, also misfired.
Frustrated INLA commanders in search of a ‘spectacular’ that would convince the authorities (and their own followers) that they were a force to be reckoned with opted for the most prominent target available, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Roy Mason. In January 1979, the Starry Plough carried a statement from INLA’s Army Council, warning of a ‘more active role’ in the coming year. It accused the British authorities of imprisoning thousands of Irish men and women and added that during 1979 INLA’s strategy would be geared to ensure that ‘imperialism and its agents will see the futility of its policy of inflicting large-scale misery on the people’. In the same month, Miriam Daly singled out Mason as the politician trying to ‘smash’ the IRSP, and so
on after the party leadership accused him of seeking to crush all political opposition in Ulster through the use of the Emergency Powers Act. Mason was frankly contemptuous of INLA, describing them as a ‘pseudo-Marxist breakaway gang’. As a consequence, INLA volunteers were sent to Mason’s home in his Barnsley constituency, where they staked out his house and the pub he frequented with his agent, Trevor Lindley. The plot was to stab Lindley and then shoot Mason at Lindley’s funeral.
But political events undermined Mason more surely than a ‘spectacular’ assassination. With the Labour government limping to general election defeat, INLA turned their attention instead to Mason’s Shadow, Airey Neave, for whom they felt equal fear and loathing. He was the obvious choice, not least because he supported Mason’s tough policy on terrorism, and more. ‘Neave was the only one, apart from Mayhew, who sought to be Secretary of State,’ a former INLA general headquarters member later disclosed. ‘He was coming in on the heels of Mason – to settle the Northern Ireland question and make Mason look like a lamb. He wanted to bring in more SAS and take the war to the enemy.’2
Ronnie Bunting, director of intelligence for the organisation’s GHQ and adjutant of the Belfast Brigade, is credited with ordering the murder of the man whose death would be ‘a popular hit’ in Ireland. Bunting was an unusual figure: a devout republican and socialist, but the son of a former army officer, Major Ronald Bunting, and hard-line loyalist supporter of the Reverend Ian Paisley. By profession a schoolteacher, he was denied employment by the Catholic Church and worked instead in the medical records department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. He lived quietly in Turf Lodge, a militant republican neighbourhood in west Belfast, but he was well-known to the army and the RUC and had once been interned. In his turn, he too would become a target for assassination. Bunting ‘chose the one man in British politics who was unequivocal in his denunciation of terrorism,’ argues Martin Dillon, a security expert.3
INLA’s historians insist that planning began only in March 1979, the month the Callaghan government fell. Jack Holland and Henry McDonald interviewed Ronnie Bunting only months after the operation and claim that unspecified ‘important information’ came from a ‘political source’ in England suggesting that Airey Neave was preparing a right-wing backlash with Thatcher as his chosen front. Thanks to this political source, it is alleged, INLA had the access and information necessary to launch a daring political assassination. This version sounds like revolutionary hyperbole. Neave’s right-wing credentials were well known: they were on parade every month during Northern Ireland Questions at Westminster, and in his many speeches and interviews on Ulster. Nor were his intentions a mystery. He favoured the mother of all crackdowns on ‘terrorist criminals’, and as a former Officer Commanding in the Territorial SAS there could be no doubt about what form it would take. The situation did not require any ‘important information’ to justify a terror strike.
INLA volunteers travelled to London to carry out the operation. They knew where Neave lived – the address of his flat in Westminster Gardens was in Who’s Who, and they were aware that he scorned personal security as much as Roy Mason revelled in it. The chosen weapon was a car bomb using the explosives smuggled in the previous year from Palestinian sources. It would be triggered by a mercury-tilt switch that completed an electrical circuit, activating a detonator plugged into the small, tightly packed explosive charge. Two experiments had already been successfully carried out on such a bomb. In December 1978, a prison officer was wounded when a charge exploded under his car, and in Portadown on 6 March 1979, Robert McAnally, an Ulster Defence Regiment serviceman, was fatally wounded by a similar bomb. He lost a leg and died six days later. The mercury-tilt detonator was invented by an INLA member from north Armagh who was fascinated with the technical side of bomb-making. He realised that the switch – freely available to the public in radio spares catalogues – could be adapted to detonate an explosive charge. When fixed to a vehicle moving up an incline, the water in the switch would come into contact with the mercury, triggering an electrical current that set off the detonator. Moreover, the bomb did not require the use of radio signals which were susceptible to discovery by army scanning machines. Sometimes, they were also inadequate for the job (a failure of radio signalling had caused the intended assassination of Sir Robin Haydon to be aborted) but the new device, fixed by small magnets under the driver’s side of the car, could be relied on to release a massive upward blast when the tiny tilt switch was activated.
Argument has raged as to whether the INLA men placed the bomb under Neave’s car outside his flat on 30 March, or whether they penetrated the security of the Palace of Westminster and laid the charge in the Commons underground car park. Much is made by INLA’s historians about inside information from within Westminster about the weakness of security around and within the Houses of Parliament. Jack Holland has argued that an unnamed ‘left-wing sympathiser’ gave them a layout of the place so they could gain entry to the car park posing as workmen. The weakness of this claim lies in the truth that security at Westminster was remarkably lax, and virtually anyone could walk in undetected to the bars (as the author did regularly) and other semi-public places like the car park if he could muster the self-confidence to walk past the policemen on duty at the St Stephen’s entrance. A courteous and confident ‘good afternoon’ sufficed.
Police and security service sources have always claimed that the bomb was put in place outside Neave’s flat a few hundred yards away. Of course the authorities would say that, to minimise embarrassment about their own incompetence. Dillon shares the view that the theory of bomb-placing in Westminster is ‘incorrect’.4
Ronnie Bunting told INLA’s historians that the assassins did infiltrate the car park and had no difficulty in locating Neave’s powder-blue Vauxhall Cavalier. As they prepared to set the charge under the car, however, they realised that the timing device, set to explode the 16-ounce bomb, was faulty. The original timer was therefore replaced with a wristwatch, its hands scraped clean of any plastic that might otherwise interfere with the connection of the electrical circuit. Having armed the device and set it to go off within an hour, the unit calmly walked away, leaving Neave to his fate.
In the Commons, MPs were discussing the Credit Union Bill. Fewer than a dozen members were in the chamber. Most had either left to begin the battle to retain their constituencies or were packing up and dictating a last letter to their secretary. Enoch Powell MP was speaking when Neave left the building and walked down to the five-floor underground car park. Neave got into his Vauxhall, registration VYY 179, and set off home. At 2.58, as he drove up the cobbled ramp into New Palace Yard, the bomb exploded in the confined space of the steep exit. The force of the explosion blew out the doors, windows and bonnet and punched up the roof. Amid the debris, official papers and sheets of the familiar green and white Commons writing paper blew around. Police who rushed to the scene could not recognise the badly injured driver but guessed, from his attire, that he was a Tory MP. His identity was not verified until after he died in hospital an hour later.
INLA was jubilant. It was ‘the operation of the decade’ they told reporters. ‘We blew him up inside the impregnable Palace of Westminster.’ Initially, the murder was assumed to be the work of the Provisional IRA, and the Provos themselves claimed responsibility. INLA was held in such low regard that a member of the organisation calling Ulster Television from Dublin to claim responsibility was told to ‘fuck off’ and the phone was slammed down on him.5 But in the tightly knit terrorist world, few questioned INLA’s coup and within two hours of the explosion a caller with a strong Dublin accent had telephoned the Irish Independent to say it was the work of the INLA. He gave forensic details as proof of the claim. A second caller telephoned the newspaper at 8.00 p.m., saying he was from the Irish Republican Socialist Party. He read out a statement given to the IRSP’s Starry Plough which gave further details of the assassination method.
The Starry Plough edition that followed
carried a statement from the Army Council of INLA dated 31 March 1979. Under the headlines ‘Break The Chains’ and ‘Airey Neave Executed’ it said (sic):
THE IRISH NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY re-iterate that one of it’s active service units was responsible for the execution of Airey Neave, British Shadow Government Spokesman on Northern Ireland.
The INLA successfully breached intense security at the House of Commons to plant the device, consisting of one kilo of explosive. After taking stringent precautions to ensure that no civilians would be injured the ASU returned to base.
Airey Neave was specially selected for assassination. He was well known for his rabid militarist calls for more repression against the Irish people and for the strengthening of the SAS murder gang, a group which has no qualms about murdering Irish people.
The INLA took this action in pursuance of its aim to get British occupying forces out of Ireland. We recognise that this task is not going to be achieved in a short period of time. We are armed, trained militarily and politically, and able to sustain what is going to be a long struggle.
We are not associated with any other group as reported in the mass media; neither are we a cover group for the Irish Republican Army (Provisional). The Irish National Liberation Army is an independent military organisation whose primary aim is to secure a British military, political and economic withdrawal from Ireland and establish the right of Irish people to determine their own destiny.
As a republican socialist organisation we recognise that the cause of Ireland and the cause of Labour are linked; and in the words of James Connolly, we cannot envisage a free Ireland without a free working class. British imperialism is responsible for the sectarian divisions within the Irish working class and we pledge ourselves to rid Ireland of imperialism and all it’s manifestations.
Public Servant, Secret Agent Page 33