[1] Journalist Walter Ellis, who was Bunting's cousin and also a Protestant left-wing advocate of a united Ireland, recalled him in their teenage years as domineering with violent tendencies.

[1] Bunting was briefly a member of People's Democracy between 1968 and 1970,[5][6] before joining Official Sinn Féin (which used the name Republican Clubs in Northern Ireland).

In 1974, Bunting followed Seamus Costello and other militants who disagreed with the OIRA's ceasefire of 1972, into a new grouping called the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).

[2] In February 1975, the Official IRA attacked a house where Bunting and Seán and Harry Flynn were hiding in near the Antrim Road with a machine gun.

[2] On 5 March 1975, Bunting survived an assassination attempt when he was shot by an Official IRA sniper when driving out of the Turf Lodge area of West Belfast.

The first instance of this was on 24 November 1976, when a Royal Welsh Fusilier patrol responded to a robbery at Monagh Post Office and Corporal Andrew Crocker was then killed by a sniper.

[2][7] Initially claimed by the Provisional IRA, it was later attributed to the INLA when Bunting called the BBC, using the "Captain Green" code name, and gave technical details of the killing.

On his release, Bunting reported that special branch detectives had beaten him and told him that he was “Northern scum” and that he had no legal rights.

Bunting later discovered the RUC were looking for him in relation to the kidnapping, and turned himself in to the nearest police station alongside the SDLP's Paddy Devlin.

The plan failed when one of the unit trigger an alarm, however, a security van was spotted during the escape and gave them ideas for a future robbery.

[2] During the June holiday weekend, the same unit, now including Patsy O'Hara, posed as council workers and robbed a security van in the Barna gap, County Galway.

[2] They shot Bunting, his wife Suzanne and another INLA man and ex-member of the Red Republican Party, Noel Lyttle, who had been staying there after his recent release from detention.

According to The Guardian report by David Beresford,[1] The shots woke the Buntings' children, age 7 and 3, who ran screaming into the street after discovering their parents lying together at the top of the stairs, covered in blood.

From her hospital bed she stated that the RUC "know, as I do, that the people who killed Ronnie and Noel knew where they could be found, in what rooms, and how best to break down the doors.