Inside the INLA’s War

The Irish National Liberation Army reached into the Palace of Westminster in March 1979. On Friday the thirtieth, a bomb attached to the car of Airey Neave, the Conservative spokesman on Northern Ireland, exploded as he left the House of Commons car park. Neave was killed, and the INLA claimed it. Yet the organisation behind it was not the IRA. It was a separate and much smaller republican group, tied to a party called the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Again and again it was fighting itself as well as the state. Its founder would be shot dead, its commanders captured or killed, and a breakaway would turn its guns on old comrades. So how did the INLA carry on its war while it kept failing to hold itself together? Airey Neave was a Conservative MP and an ally of Margaret Thatcher. In the spring of 1979 a general election had been called, and had he lived he would very probably have become Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the new government. He had argued for a strong security response to republican paramilitaries. In July, a masked person claiming to speak for the INLA repeated in a television interview that it had carried out the killing. That month Margaret Thatcher, by then Prime Minister, criticised the BBC for broadcasting an interview with a member of the INLA. Eight years later, Sir John Biggs-Davison, who had been Neave's deputy on the Opposition front bench, asked the Commons what progress had been made in catching his killers. A Home Office minister replied that the INLA's claim had been accepted as valid, and that nobody had been charged. The name was new to most people in Britain. In July 1979 the government moved to outlaw it everywhere in the United Kingdom, and on the twenty-fifth the Northern Ireland minister Michael Alison explained why. The INLA, he told the Commons, had been described as the "military wing" of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, a political group that had broken away from Official Sinn Féin in 1974. Besides killing Neave, he said, the INLA had admitted other attacks in Northern Ireland. A soldier of the Ulster Defence Regiment had been killed in them, and so had a woman prison officer and a member of the RUC Reserve, the reserve force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's police, had been killed. In his words it was "a squalid criminal conspiracy". Alison was frank about its size. The INLA, he said, was a much smaller organisation than the Provisional IRA, and of much less significance in numbers. Ministers had worried that banning it might give it a kind of spurious glamour, a status it could otherwise only pretend to. They banned it anyway. It became an offence to belong to the INLA, to profess to belong to it, or to raise money for it. Alison admitted the limits of the step. Neither the police nor the government, he said, claimed that proscription would make immediate and substantial inroads into destroying the organisation; groups like this were unlikely to issue membership cards. For the Opposition, Tom Pendry supported the ban, drawing what he called a clear distinction between political and criminal acts.