Clare, were "not so uncommon that they would be considered abnormal". Personality and reputation Personality and approach The author Martin Dillon met McGlinchey in the mid-1980s and described him as "six feet tall, and lean, with a receding hairline. In his 30s, his slightly rounded face gave him the look of a much younger man." Coogan also visited McGlinchey in Portlaoise and wrote that he appeared "tired, reduced by his past and by prison". He had a tricolour tattoo on his left forearm. The Gardaí later described McGlinchey as vain, and enjoying melodrama. Edna O'Brien described him as "most reflective and at the same time most forthcoming". She later told Marianne Heron of the Irish Independent that she had told McGlinchey "that she liked everything about him except what he was [and] he told her that his mother said the same thing". O'Brien also denied ever having an affair with McGlinchey; she claimed later that, as a result of her research for a book, she had to refute questions as to whether she "had love affairs with republicans". His reputation, suggests the writer Jonathan Stevenson, became that of "fabled killer", while Coogan describes him as "a latter-day Ned Kelly", as committed to republicanism as Frances Hughes yet with far greater notoriety. He was also, suggest Holland and McDonald, "probably the most famous and most charismatic INLA chief of staff since Séamus Costello". Where Costello ruled by collective agreement, though, McGlinchey ruled by decree; his tenure as INLA chief of staff has been summed up as "brutal, authoritarian, but nonetheless still relatively cohesive" by researcher Gary Ackerman. McGlinchey, at his own estimate, killed "around...30" people in his career, of whom all but one, he said, were members of the security forces; the historian Keith Jeffrey has calculated that McGlinchey was responsible for 28 murders, 30 bombings and 11 armed robberies. According to the journalist Nicholas Davies, his victims were "mainly officers of the RUC, the army and the UDR. He also murdered civilians." Holland and McDonald suggest that during his tenure as Chief of Staff McGlinchey "held the organisation together" at a time when it was expected to implode. McGlinchey, a contemporary said, "made his own luck", and Davies described McGlinchey as "a fearless man who would take extraordinary risks", particularly in his tactic of close-quarters engagements. The scholar C. M. Drake notes, however, that "where there is little protection for