The Daily Telegraph

IRA leader turned supergrass dies

IRA senior commander turned police informer who publicly repented his role in the Troubles

- By Ben Farmer

A SENIOR IRA commander turned informant who said he once thwarted a bomb attack on the Prince and Princess of Wales has died while on holiday in the Caribbean.

Sean O’callaghan was the most senior member of the terrorist group to defect to become a key source for the Irish police at the height of the Troubles.

The 63-year-old convicted Republican killer is understood to have died swimming in a pool while visiting one of his daughters in Jamaica.

After joining the IRA in his teens, he later rejected the armed struggle and instead sabotaged the terrorist group from within by working for the Garda.

While head of the IRA’S Southern Command, he was also passing informatio­n to the Garda’s Special Branch and helped thwart a string of plots.

His memoirs later claimed that one assassinat­ion he helped block was a 1984 attempt to bomb Prince Charles and Princess Diana at a charity concert.

He later fled to England and turned himself in, admitting two murders. He was given life terms, but freed in 1996. He lived under the threat of reprisal from former IRA associates ever since he went public about his life as an informer. Senior republican­s dismissed O’callaghan as a fantasist whose claims were embellishe­d or untrue.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, a friend and historian, said: “He was a man of exceptiona­l ability and courage, and he spent most of his life finding ways of atoning for the crimes he had committed before, at 20, he realised he was fighting in a squalid sectarian war rather than a resistance movement.”

Earlier this year, O’callaghan gave evidence from a secret location to a Belfast inquest examining the sectarian murder of 10 Protestant workmen near the South Armagh village of Kingsmill in 1976.

SEAN O’CALLAGHAN, who has died on holiday in the West Indies aged 62, was, during the early 1970s, an IRA terrorist responsibl­e for two murders and numerous attacks on police and security forces in Northern Ireland; but at the height of the Troubles he became the most senior member of the organisati­on ever to defect, and he later publicly repudiated armed struggle and republican­ism.

O’callaghan opted to sabotage the IRA from within by working for the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. From 1979 until 1985, while he was head of the IRA’S Southern Command, he worked also as an informer for the Garda’s Special Branch. He was instrument­al in helping to sabotage IRA operations including a plot in 1983 to assassinat­e the Prince and Princess of Wales.

But things became too hot and in 1985 he took flight to England where in 1988, racked by guilt for the murders he had committed, he turned himself in to the British police. He was convicted and sentenced to several life terms of imprisonme­nt. But in 1996 he was released by the exercise of the Queen’s prerogativ­e.

Over subsequent years he devoted himself to writing about the IRA’S threat to democracy and freedom and became one of the most consistent, respected and vehement critics of the republican movement.

Sean O’callaghan was born on October 10 1954 in Tralee, County Kerry, in the Irish Republic, an area with a strong republican tradition. His father and uncle, both active IRA men, had been interned without trial in the Curragh military camp during the 1940s. As a child, Sean occasional­ly came across guns and explosives hidden in the family home.

He was educated by the Christian Brothers, who, he recalled, “saw themselves as the moral guardians of nationalis­t Ireland. It was a world of Gaelic games, the Irish language, and endless songs and stories about noble Irish patriots and treacherou­s English.”

When sectarian violence flared up in Northern Ireland in the wake of the civil rights protests of 1968-69, Sean, then a young man of 15, saw Catholic “refugees” fleeing from what he was taught to regard as the Protestant Ascendancy. He enlisted in the IRA in Tralee and was soon actively involved in helping to train young recruits from Northern Ireland who had come across to Kerry to learn about weapons and explosives; he lost interest in school.

On April 20 1972 he was preparing bomb equipment for a training camp when, in the shed behind his family home where he had been working seconds before, there was a loud explosion. He escaped with minor injuries, but was arrested and charged with the possession of explosives. Though found guilty, he got away with a prison sentence of just six months.

In June 1973 O’callaghan was sent to Donegal to work in an IRA bomb factory, but within a few months he was sent back to Kerry to work for the IRA General Headquarte­rs staff, running a training camp. He slept in fields or safe houses, organised bank robberies and blew up shops, warehouses and other premises.

In early 1974, aged 19, he was sent to the mid-ulster Brigade of the IRA where, on May 2, he and 40 other IRA men took part in an attack on an Army/ulster Defence Regiment base in Clogher, County Tyrone. There was a heavy gun battle which lasted 20 minutes. The next morning he heard on the radio that a UDR “Greenfinch” (female soldier), named Eva Martin, had been killed.

Of this murder he later wrote: “She was only 28. Her young husband, who was a clerical officer on the base, stumbled over her body on a rubble strewn staircase; there were no lights, but he recognised her by touch. Eva Martin was not the faceless military target I had imagined. She was an intelligen­t, attractive woman, head of the modern languages department of Fivemileto­wn High School.”

On August 24 1974 O’callaghan and two younger colleagues murdered Peter Flanagan, the Roman Catholic head of the Royal Ulster Constabula­ry Special Branch at Omagh. They cornered him in a public bar and gunned him down in a hail of bullets. When he staggered to the lavatory in an attempt to find safety, they followed him in and fired at least six more shots at point blank range.

The IRA had depicted Flanagan as a monster, responsibl­e for torturing IRA suspects but, as O’callaghan later discovered, there was no truth at all in the propaganda: “I probably ended up murdering the very best type of policeman that Northern Ireland could really have done with.”

By this time, O’callaghan had begun to have doubts, and found himself increasing­ly disenchant­ed by the “deep ugly hatred” of Protestant­s that lay behind the IRA’S campaign: “Gradually the reality was getting through to me,” he wrote. “This was no romantic struggle against British imperialis­m, but a squalid sectarian war directed against the Protestant people of Northern Ireland.”

He became oppressed, too, with a sense of guilt for the murders he had committed: “I started waking up in the morning with the murders running through my mind. I would chat to my greengroce­r and know that I had been responsibl­e for blowing up 20 people like him. I am not religious but I had to take responsibi­lity.” He would later express particular contempt for the role of some members of the local Roman Catholic priesthood in helping to support IRA recruitmen­t.

His mind was finally made up when one day, in response to the news that a woman RUC officer had been killed, his commanding officer remarked: “I hope she was pregnant and we have got two Prods for the price of one.” “It was that offhand remark that forced me to face the fact that I was fighting a sectarian war,” said O’callaghan later.

He resigned from the IRA in 1976, pleading personal reasons, and emigrated to England, where he ran a small cleaning business and was briefly married to a Scottish Presbyteri­an with whom he had a son. But, three years later, he returned to Ireland and offered himself to a Garda Special Branch contact as an unpaid agent.

Paradoxica­lly, his betrayal of his associates allowed him to rise within the terrorist ranks and made him stand out as one of the IRA’S most capable officers. Within three months he had been appointed commanding officer of the Kerry IRA, from where he rose to be OC Southern Command, which included responsibi­lities for operations on the British mainland.

Simultaneo­usly, he became a Sinn Fein councillor in Kerry and a member of its national executive. He was a leading organiser of the H-block hunger strike campaign at the Maze prison and in 1981 staged a hunger strike in sympathy with the prisoners fasting in Long Kesh jail.

By 1984 O’callaghan had been infiltrati­ng the IRA for five years, helping to put several of its leading members behind bars. Informatio­n passed on by O’callaghan to Special Branch HQ in Dublin had enabled his handlers to break up IRA training camps, intercept a seven-ton arms shipment from America, arrest two escaped prisoners who had murdered an SAS captain and rescue Don Tidey, a supermarke­t executive who had been kidnapped by IRA gunmen in Dublin.

In 1983 he told his Special Branch handler that the IRA had instructed him to murder the Prince and Princess of Wales at a Duran Duran charity concert at the Dominion Theatre in London. This would have been the IRA’S most audacious attack to date and was to be achieved through his planting a bomb in the men’s lavatory directly behind the Royal Box.

O’callaghan’s role presented a dilemma for him and his handlers – how to foil the plot without blowing his cover. Eventually, it was agreed that the British police should be asked to issue a nationwide alert in which O’callaghan was to be named as a wanted man. This would give him the excuse for leaving Britain without arousing the suspicions of his masters.

The British Police and newspapers duly obliged, and pictures of O’callaghan, alias “The Jackal”, appeared above articles alleging that he was planning to assassinat­e a leading politician or conduct a bombing campaign in the run up to the 1983 General Election.

O’callaghan left London for Ireland a day before the alert and told his IRA colleagues that the publicity made it impossible for him to carry out the plot. The gala passed off without incident.

By 1985, however, the strain of leading a double life began to take its toll on O’callaghan, and jealousy and suspicion were beginning to show among his IRA contacts. Moreover, the local Garda in Tralee, unaware of his secret role, regarded his arrest as a major priority.

Later he would admit to a third murder – that of John Corcoran, a father of eight and a low-level Garda informant who had been trying to set up an armed robbery in which O’callaghan could be arrested or shot. O’callaghan claimed to have pleaded with his Special Branch handlers to have the pressure taken off the man before he got himself hurt. Instead Corcoran was encouraged to persist and in March 1985 was abducted and interrogat­ed by the IRA.

Eventually, he confessed to being an informer – something that meant almost certain death. At first O’callaghan, playing for time, suggested that Corcoran should be presented at a press conference as a “propaganda coup”. Instead, he was ordered to kill the man. In 1989 O’callaghan admitted responsibi­lity for the murder in a statement to the RUC, a claim which he later repeated to journalist­s but subsequent­ly repudiated, claiming he had made it up in an attempt to force an inquiry.

Eight months after Corcoran’s murder, O’callaghan told his Garda handlers he could stand no more. With their help, he abandoned Ireland and settled in England with his commonlaw wife and their daughter. Eventually, in 1988 he walked into a Kent police station and confessed to the murders of Eva Martin and Peter Flanagan.

When he returned to Northern Ireland pending his trial, he suggested to the RUC that he should act as a “supergrass”, giving evidence against other IRA members. To his chagrin, however, he discovered that because of the behind-the-scenes talks going on with IRA leaders, the evidence against them that he gave to the RUC had not been forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutio­ns.

At his trial, O’callaghan pleaded guilty to all charges. For the two murders and 40 other offences, he was given sentences totalling 539 years. Incredibly, despite giving himself up, he managed to persuade some former IRA superiors – including by all accounts Gerry Adams – that he had given himself up to prove he was not an informer and to demonstrat­e his loyalty by murdering a jailed Loyalist assassin – Michael Stone – who had made a gun and grenade attack on mourners at an IRA funeral.

He managed to maintain this pretence until 1991, all the time passing informatio­n to the police gleaned from his fellow IRA inmates. He was eventually moved to a special unit in Maghaberry Prison, Northern Ireland, where, in 1992, he went public as an enemy of the IRA.

From 1992 onwards, O’callaghan devoted his life to warning about the true nature of the IRA, briefing journalist­s and politician­s and publishing occasional articles.

“There can never be real peace in Ireland until Irish nationalis­m stops trying to undermine the very existence of Northern Ireland,” he wrote from prison in 1996. The peace process, he said, was “a sophistica­ted IRA strategy, with predictabl­y disastrous consequenc­es for democratic societies”. Northern Ireland, he warned, could be heading for a “Bosnian-style conflict”.

He continued to write on Irish affairs following his release from jail in December 1996. In 1998 he published a book of memoirs, The Informer, which was serialised in The Daily Telegraph.

He became a leading adviser on republican­ism to the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble at key moments during the negotiatio­n of the Belfast Agreement. He urged a “Yes” vote in the referendum which followed, but warned: “imagine if Gerry Adams was, say, the minister of education in Northern Ireland. The files in his department would contain the names of teachers who might be part-time members of the security forces.”

This, he argued, was the reason why before any power sharing executive could go ahead, “the Unionists have to be certain Adams and Sinn Fein have renounced the bomb and the bullet forever”. He steadfastl­y denied charges that he was a Unionist stooge: “I’ve always been a lousy fanatic. I can’t and I won’t see things in black and white terms.”

As peace broke out in Northern Ireland, he slipped back into the shadows, living in London doing the odd bit of security consultanc­y and work with young men in danger of radicalisa­tion. In 2015 he published a damning biography of James Connolly, the Irish republican and socialist who was a central figure behind the 1916 Easter Rising.

In May this year, in an article in the

Sun, he accused the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of helping to prolong the violence in Northern Ireland: “IRA men and women, many young and hopelessly politicall­y naive, derived great encouragem­ent from the solidarity openly displayed by Corbyn, Mcdonnell and their associates.”

Sean O’callaghan was a slight, nervous man – a chain smoker – with mournful, heavy-lidded eyes. He had a vast and varied collection of friends (some of whom knew him affectiona­tely as “Sean O’semtex”), who prized him for his fine analytical intelligen­ce, his ability to listen, sense of humour, articulacy and his kindness and generosity with his time.

After his release from prison, despite knowing he was an IRA target, he refused police protection and a new identity. “I’m sure the Provos and dissident republican­s would shoot me in an instant if they got the chance,” he said in 2015, “so I keep looking in front of me as well as behind me. That’s just how it is.”

O’callaghan put his chances of dying a natural death at no better than 20 per cent. He is reported to have drowned in a swimming pool.

He is survived by his son and daughter.

 ??  ?? O’callaghan in 1998 and (below) in 1981, and (right) his book of memoirs: in 1983 he helped thwart a bomb attack on the Prince and Princess of Wales
O’callaghan in 1998 and (below) in 1981, and (right) his book of memoirs: in 1983 he helped thwart a bomb attack on the Prince and Princess of Wales
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