McGlinchey, he says, was aware that the amount of attention he would attract on his release would constrain his freedom of action and possibly endanger those he fought alongside. He may also have been warned by the IRA leadership that, for the same reason, he would be unable to return to a commanding role. Consequentially he appears to have considered looking for a new role in Sinn Féin, probably to provide him with cover while organising overall strategy. But, says Dillon, "the more McGlinchey considered the option of a political role, the less he was enamoured of the idea". He suspected he would dislike taking orders from a Sinn Féin manager, and even more so from one that "had never pulled a trigger". An anonymous ex-volunteer told Dillon that "the prospect of being an armchair general didn't much appeal to [McGlinchey], considering the fact that he hated armchair generals". Breakdown of relations with IRA Towards the end of his term, McGlinchey fell out with the IRA's prison leadership, particularly with the ex-Vice President of Sinn Féin, Dáithí Ó Conaill, and the Dublin leadership generally, whom he called "armchair generals". As McGlinchey saw it, they were "sitting in the relative security of Dublin while he and Hughes were out shooting up the countryside of South Derry". The confrontation almost turned physical. Dillon's source told him that McGlinchey "was not a man to back down—that was his nature. There was a rumour that he told O'Connell [Dáithí Ó Conaill] he was nothing but a fucking schoolteacher and an armchair general". This was ill-advised, says the source, as the other IRA prisoners in Portlaoise admired Ó Conaill as a "hero and intellectual". As a result, McGlinchey and the Provisional IRA parted company, and he joined the INLA. Whose decision this was, remains unclear. The IRA leadership said they expelled McGlinchey from the republican wing for indiscipline; McGlinchey, in turn, claimed the Provisionals "had become too soft". A volunteer who was inside with McGlinchey at the time later recalled how vague the information was: "They say that when he was in Portlaoise that he left the Provos and went to the INLA. The Provos say that he couldn't take orders, he wanted to be the big guy, so they threw him out, court-martialled him...some would say there was other stuff involved." While imprisoned, McGlinchey had begun to develop his political understanding of Irish Republicanism