IRA splinter Irish National Liberation Army disarms, offers no regret for its decades of death

IRA splinter group disarms; no apology for carnage

DUBLIN — A ruthless IRA splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, declared Monday it has fully disarmed but said it had no regrets for committing some of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict.

“We make no apology for our part in the conflict,” said INLA spokesman Martin McMonagle, who spent seven years in prison for plotting to plant bombs in England and assassinate Northern Ireland’s senior Protestant politicians.

Northern Ireland’s disarmament chief, retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, confirmed he and other officials had recently received and destroyed Irish National Liberation Army guns, ammunition, explosives and bomb parts in secret ceremonies. In a statement he said INLA officials — who have observed a shaky cease-fire since 1998 — had assured them that the weapons represented their entire illicit arsenal.

In a surprise move, the general also confirmed that a long-dormant faction, the Official IRA, recently handed over its own modest stockpile of guns. The Officials were the first IRA faction to call a cease-fire in 1972 but have remained a criminal racketeering and money-laundering force in working-class parts of Belfast.

De Chastelain declined to provide further details in keeping with his clandestine efforts since 1997 to persuade all of Northern Ireland’s rival underground armies to surrender weapons.

He already has confirmed the disarmament of the most elaborately armed group, the Irish Republican Army, in 2001-2005 followed by the province’s two major British Protestant paramilitary groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, in June 2009 and January 2010, respectively.

The Anglo-Irish legislation that empowered de Chastelain to collect weapons from outlaws expires Tuesday in Northern Ireland and Feb. 23 in the Republic of Ireland. After these deadlines pass, anyone caught with paramilitary weapons likely faces prison time — a threat spurring the recent rush to surrender stockpiles.

The lapsing disarmament laws also mean de Chastelain and his largely Finnish and American staff are expected to shut their offices in Belfast and Dublin after publishing a final progress report to the British and Irish governments later this month.

The only paramilitary gangs still committed to keeping weapons are two small anti-British factions, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, which reject Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord and the paramilitary disarmament it proposed. Both IRA dissident groups still mount occasional bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland.