‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey denied role in infamous Darkley mission hall massacre

But he was lying through his teeth, the Sunday World has learned.

William Brown 59, John Cunningham 39, and David Wilson 44, died in a hail of bullets when McGlinchey’s republican terror mob gunned them down.

The 60-strong Christian sect was at prayer in the Mountain Lodge Pentecostal Church, when the sound of automatic gunfire filled the air, 40 years ago this month.

The small gospel hall overlooking the former mill village of Darkley in south Armagh lies close to the border with the Irish Republic. And the INLA had singled it out for attack.

As terrified children screamed, seven other worshipers were struck as the gunmen continued to fire through the church’s paper-thin wooden walls.

The faithful were still singing the final verse of the hymn ‘Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?’ when the slaughter started around 6.20pm.

As per usual, the Sunday evening service was recorded. And the sound of live gunfire provided a stark and chilling contrast to the happy sound of the worshippers.

William Brown and John Cunningham, whose job it was to welcome visitors and find them a seat died at the church entrance.

David Wilson, who was standing behind, was also hit. He was shot twice in the face. But somehow, he managed to alert the others by staggering into the service. He tried to speak, but his words weren’t audible.

The wounded man stumbled onward to a small room behind the Preacher’s platform before dropping down dead. But the gunfire continued - at an increased rate - as the other two gunmen joined in the slaughter.

Their powerful automatic bullets easily pierced the wooden shell of the building.

Of the 60 worshipers present, 26 were children. Many of them were able to dive under the seats for cover, when the shooting started.

But the Sunday World can today reveal, that within hours of the attack, the name Dominic McGlinchey - who was himself murdered 11 years later - topped a list of suspects supplied to the police.

“Within an hour, our contacts inside the INLA, told us who carried out the shooting at Darkley,” said a former RUC Special Branch officer.

As a getaway driver remained in his vehicle, three masked gunmen approached the open doors of the hilltop gospel hall, before one of them - armed with a Ruger automatic rifle - opened fire at two middle-aged men standing at the entrance.

The dubious pleasure of being the first INLA gunman to pull the trigger at the Mission Hall had been personally gifted to an Armagh man by Dominic McGlinchey, because two of his close relatives had recently been murdered by loyalists and members of the security forces.

“It was a revenge attack on entirely innocent people. The Pentecostal people of Darkley paid for something which had nothing to do with them.” a republican source told us this week.

Following the attack, a previously unheard of group claimed responsibility for it.

A chilling claim of responsibility was made by the so-called ‘Catholic Reaction Force’.

And in a call to a journalist, a spokesman said the Darkley killings were in response to recent murders of innocent Catholics by the ‘Protestant Action Force’.

The caller added, that unless the murder campaign against Catholics stopped immediately, “we will make the Darkley killings look like a picnic.”

And at 3.45pm the next day, Lord Mansfield - a Government spokesman for Northern Ireland - confidently told fellow Peers in the House of Lords, the blood bath at Darkley, had been the work of the Irish National Liberation Army.

“One of the weapons has been forensically linked to a previous murder carried out and claimed by the INLA.” he said.

The identities of all four members of the Mountain Lodge murder gang is known to the Sunday, but we are refraining from naming all of them today for legal reasons.

And we have managed to track down a picture showing three of them wearing paramilitary uniforms and balaclavas.

They are marching behind a bogus coffin at a stage-managed funeral in Monaghan, following the death of IRA jail hunger striker Kieran Doherty in 1981.

Belfast-born Doherty was a member of the Provisional IRA. He died on August 2 1981 after spending 73 days on hunger strike in the Maze Prison.

Kieran Doherty was one of 10 IRA men who sacrificed their lives in pursuit of prisoners’ demands, following the Thatcher Government’s determination to criminalise convicted IRA men, who had previously been viewed as political.

In 1981, Kieran Doherty was elected TD for the Cavan-Monaghan Constituency.

Six days after the Darkley Massacre, INLA leader Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey gave an interview to a Dublin newspaper, where he denied personal involvement.

But he admitted supplying a semi-automatic Ruger rifle which had been used in the attack. And he placed the blame for the attack on an INLA member who had previously lost a brother to loyalist violence.

“He must have become unbalanced or something, to have gone and organised this killing. We are conducting an inquiry into the whole affair,” said McGlinchey.

Sunday World inquiries revealed McGlinchey’s partial change of mind to accepting INLA responsibility - whilst denying his own central role - was because he had come under severe pressure to do so.

Senior members of the INLA’s political wing - the Irish Republican Socialist Party - were outraged by the Darkley attack, viewing it a purely sectarian. And they pressed McGlinchey to admit it.

With the exception of Dominic McGlinchey - who was gunned down by rivals in 1994 - all of those involved in the Darkley Massacre are still alive.

And none of them has ever been made amenable for the atrocity which sent shockwaves around the world 40 years ago.

At the time, RUC detectives openly laid the blame for Darkley at the feet of Bellaghy man Dominic McGlinchey.

They linked one of the weapons used to the murder of Reserve Constable in the centre of Cookstown on May 26 the same year.

And the Ruger rifle had also been used to murder Constables Snowden Corkery and Ronnie Irwin in Markethill on 16 November 1982. McGlinchey was personally involved in both incidents, detectives claimed.

The weapons used at Darkley were personally handed over to Dominic McGlinchey by Tony McCloskey, a 28 year-old married man who held the rank of Officer Commanding the INLA in Monaghan town.

A father of two, McCloskey lived with his family on the Mullaghmatt council housing estate. And he had control of an illegal arms dump in the nearby Rossmore Forest Park.

McCloskey enjoyed a close friendship with Dominic McGlinchey. But he was later a victim of a vicious internal feud which decimated the republican organisation.

In February 1987, an armed INLA gang burst into his home at Kieran Doherty Park and abducted him at gunpoint.

McCloskey’s bound body was later found on a border road, near Middletown. He had been shot several times.

A pathologists report revealed, his killers had used bolt cutters to remove his right index finger and part of his right ear lobe.

The missing body parts were later discovered inside the dead man’s stomach.

In 1990, a new Pentecostal Church was built on the Mountain Lodge site outside Darkley.

But the old wooden hut where the Massacre had taken place was moved by crane to a new position just across the car park. Bullets holes in the building were repaired and today it functions as Sunday School for children.

This week Pastor David Bell - whose wife Sally was shot in the elbow during the gun attack, said he was pleased to report his flock at Mountain Lodge, was as vibrant as ever, with an increased congregation.

He said: “Very few of our congregation today have any recollection or connection to what happened here 40 years ago.”