Kieran Fleming

[10] He is reputed to have backed a plan to form full-time guerilla units or flying columns based in the Republic, which would carry out four or five large scale attacks in the north a year.

This approach was espoused by the militant Provisional IRA East Tyrone Brigade led by Padraig McKearney and Jim Lynagh, who wanted an escalation of the conflict to what they termed "total war".

They were opposed by Kevin McKenna, the IRA Chief of Staff and by the republican leadership headed by Gerry Adams, on the grounds that actions on that scale were too big a risk and unsustainable.

[11][12] On Sunday morning, 2 December 1984, Fleming and Antoine Mac Giolla Bhrighde stole a Toyota van in Pettigo, County Donegal.

The RUC fired plastic bullets as a riot ensued and Fleming’s coffin was maneuvered through the streets into the Bogside, then to the cemetery “where Martin [McGuinness], an IRA firing party and others were waiting.”[18] In 2002, a row erupted when a monument to Fleming, MacGiolla Bhrighde and Sligo Volunteer Joe MacManus was sited close to the place where Protestant workmen William Hassard and Frederick Love were killed by the IRA in 1988.