The killer who turned on the IRA
Sean O’callaghan was an IRA killer and bomb-maker who came to despise the organisation – and turned informer. Among other things, he was credited with thwarting a plot to blow up Prince Charles and Princess Diana at a pop concert in 1983. He spent his life anticipating retribution: indeed, he once said that he felt the IRA had a right to kill him. Yet when he died last week, aged 63, it was not at the hands of one of his Republican enemies, who reckoned he had betrayed them to save his own skin – but in a swimming pool in Jamaica, where he was visiting his daughter.
Born in Tralee, Co Kerry, in 1954, Sean O’callaghan grew up in a family steeped in the Republican cause. “When you shoot a British policeman, dig him up and shoot him again because you can never trust them,” his grandmother told him, when he was nine. By the age of 15, he had followed his father into the guerrilla group: it was the late 1960s and, fired up by the unrest in Belfast and Londonderry, young Irishmen were flocking to join the “struggle”. Over the next few years, he participated in 70 attacks. In 1974, he fired a shell that killed Eva Martin, a 28-year-old soldier. Soon after, he killed a Special Branch officer named Peter Flanagan, as he was sitting in a pub in Omagh, reading the paper: following his grandmother’s advice, O’callaghan shot him nine times. Yet by now, he recalled, he was having doubts about the honour of his mission; a turning point came the next year, when he heard a fellow IRA man say that he hoped a victim of another attack had been pregnant, as it would mean that they’d got “two Prods for the price of one”.
In 1976 he left for London, where he married a Presbyterian Scot and started a cleaning business. Then, having made contact with the Irish police, he rejoined the IRA to inform on its activities, and sabotage its operations. After 11 years, with suspicions about him growing, he walked into a police station in Kent and confessed to the murders of Flanagan and Martin. “If you’ve murdered people and blown up their businesses, you have to pay for it,” he said. “Just saying sorry isn’t much cop.” He was released nine years later. Living relatively openly in England, he continued to pour scorn on the IRA, warning that its leaders could not be trusted to deliver peace.