Former INLA prisoner deported from US to Ireland

Belfast-born Malachy McAllister, 62, served three-and-a-half years of a seven-year combined sentence in the 1980s for conspiring to murder RUC officers during the hunger strikes and was targeted by loyalists after his release in 1985.

He and his family fled to the US in 1988 to seek political asylum and he has lived in New Jersey ever since, winning support from senior politicians and judges for his campaign against deportation to Ireland.

Mr McAllister won sympathy in 2006 from Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, the eldest sister of future President Donald Trump, who appealed to the US Attorney General at the time “to exercise his discretion and permit this deserving family to stay”.

In a statement, Judge James F. McKay III, president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largest Irish-American organisation, said “the fears expressed by Judge Trump Barry have come to pass, and the torch of liberty that the Statue of Liberty holds burns less brightly today”.

He expressed his disappointment that Mr McAllister’s claim for asylum “was denied on the grounds of his unjust incarceration, whose sentence he had fulfilled”.