A brutal terrorist who found his redemption in stopping murder of innocents
O’Callaghan could not ignore his conscience and became an IRA informer at height of the Troubles
SEÁN O’Callaghan, who drowned aged 62 while visiting one of his children in Jamaica this week, 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 An Garda Síochána. From 1979 until 1985, while he was head of the IRA’s Southern Command, he was an informer.
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.
O’Callaghan was born on October 10, 1954, in Tralee, Co Kerry. His father and uncle were both active IRA men who had been interned without trial in the Curragh military camp during the 1940s. As a child, Seán occasionally came across guns and explosives hidden in the family home.
He was educated by the Christian Brothers. “It was a world of ...endless songs and stories about noble Irish patriots and treacherous English,” he recalled.
When sectarian violence flared up in the North in the wake of the civil rights protests of 1968-69, Seán, then 15, enlisted in the IRA.
On April 20, 1972, he was preparing bomb equipment when, in the shed behind his family home where he had been seconds before, there was an 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.
In early 1974, he took part in an attack on an army/ Ulster Defence Regiment base in Clogher, Co Tyrone. UDR soldier Eva Martin was killed in the gun battle.
Of this murder, he later wrote: “She was only 28... Eva Martin was not the faceless military target I imagined.”
On August 24, 1974, O’Callaghan and two younger colleagues murdered Peter Flanagan, the Roman Catholic head of the RUC Special Branch at Omagh. They cornered him in a bar and gunned him down.
The IRA had said Flanagan had tortured IRA suspects but, as O’Callaghan later discovered, there was no truth in the propaganda.
By this time, O’Callaghan had begun to have doubts. “Gradually the reality was getting through to me,” he wrote. “This was no romantic struggle against British imperialism, but a squalid sectarian war.
“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.”
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.”
He quit the IRA in 1976 and emigrated to England. But, three years later, he returned to Ireland and offered himself to a Garda Special Branch contact as an unpaid agent.
Three months later he had been appointed commanding officer of the Kerry IRA, from where he rose to be OC Southern Command, which included responsibilities for operations in Britain.
Simultaneously, he became a Sinn Féin councillor in Kerry. He was a leading organiser of the hunger strike at the Maze prison.
By 1984, O’Callaghan had helped to put several leading IRA members behind bars. Information passed on by O’Callaghan had enabled his handlers to break up IRA training camps, intercept an arms shipments, arrest two escaped prisoners and rescue Don Tidey, a supermarket executive who had been kidnapped by IRA gunmen.
In 1983, he told his Special Branch handler that the IRA had instructed him to murder the Prince and Princess of Wales at a concert in London by planting a bomb in the men’s toilet 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 would 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.
The British police and newspapers duly obliged. The gala passed off without incident.
By 1985, however, the strain of his double life began to take its toll. Moreover, gardaí 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 low-level informant who had been trying to set up a 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.
In 1989, O’Callaghan admitted responsibility for the murder in a statement to the RUC.
‘I would chat to my greengrocer knowing that I had been responsible for blowing up 20 people like him’
Eight months after Corcoran’s murder, O’Callaghan settled in England. Eventually, in 1988 he confessed to the murders of Eva Martin and Peter Flanagan. 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. In 1992, he went public as an enemy of the IRA. From 1992, O’Callaghan devoted his life to warning about the true nature of the IRA. “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.
He continued to write on the North following his release in December 1996.
He became a leading adviser on republicanism to the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble at key moments during the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement.
In May this year, he accused the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of helping to prolong the violence in the North: “IRA men and women, many young and hopelessly naive, derived great encouragement from the solidarity openly displayed by Corbyn, McDonnell and their associates.”
After his release from prison, despite knowing he was an IRA target, he refused police protection. “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.”
He put his chances of dying a natural death at no better than 20pc.
He is survived by his son and daughter. (© Daily Telegraph, London)