Sean O’Callaghan, who has died aged 62 after being found dead in a swimming pool while on holiday in Jamaica, once blew kisses at the man he was betraying in court. In pointing out Thomas “Slab” Murphy in the packed public gallery of Dublin high court in 1998 with such a brazen, cheeky gesture, the one-time commander of the Provisional IRA in the Irish Republic infuriated the South Armagh man and his supporters.
Murphy had attempted to sue the Sunday Times for libel over the paper’s allegation that the border farmer was the one time PIRA chief of staff responsible for dozens of murders and bomb attacks both in Northern Ireland and Great Britain. He lost the case in large part due to the testimony of O’Callaghan and other IRA “pentiti” during the trial.
Among those who also gave evidence in court that year against Murphy was Eamon Collins, a one-time IRA intelligence officer turned informer who gave a harrowing inside account of life in the Provisionals in his critically acclaimed book Killing Rage (1997). A year after the trial Collins was found dead on the side of a South Armagh road, having sustained horrific injuries to his head and upper body. Unlike Collins, who chose to go back to live in South Armagh after the Murphy libel trial, O’Callaghan steered clear of Ireland, coming back to the island only on fleeting, secret trips. He knew the ever-present danger of former comrades exacting revenge upon him just as they had done on Collins.
O’Callaghan, too, wrote a frank book about his life in the IRA. The Informer (1998) detailed the many operations and attacks he helped thwart, ranging from a bomb plot to kill the Prince and Princess of Wales at a Duran Duran concert in London in 1983 to a huge IRA arms shipment from the US which the Irish security forces intercepted.
The rake-thin, chain-smoking, waxen-faced Kerry man remained up until his death both a haunted and a hunted person. Even in encounters with him in the theatre district of London’s West End, where he chose to meet journalists, O’Callaghan was always watching over his shoulder, checking for unfamiliar faces among the waiting staff tending to tables nearby or the sight of a possibly familiar figure from back home emerging into places like St Martin’s Lane.
He was haunted due to his own part in the violent campaign of the Provisional IRA. Born in Tralee, Co Kerry, O’Callaghan came from a family with a history of republican involvement, and received his schooling from the Christian Brothers. He said he was attracted towards the IRA at the start of the Troubles because of an obsession with the Irish revolutionary socialist and 1916 rebel James Connolly. As much of a leftist as a nationalist, O’Callaghan believed back then that the re-awakened republican “armed struggle” could lead to a revolution across the island of Ireland with the Provisionals as its cutting edge.
By the early 1970s he was in Northern Ireland, belonging to a border-based IRA unit. On his own admission he was part of an IRA team that fired mortar bombs into a military base at Clogher, south of Omagh in Co Tyrone, in 1974, killing Private Eva Martin of the Ulster Defence Regiment. In a latter confession to police, O’Callaghan also admitted to murdering the RUC detective Peter Flanagan in a bar in Omagh.
Co Tyrone was his stamping ground in IRA operations north of the border, but soon he became disillusioned with what he was seeing and hearing all around him. O’Callaghan claimed that it was the overt sectarianism of some of the northern IRA volunteers and commanders he was dealing with that convinced him he had gone down the road to perdition.
In 1976 he moved to England and tried to cut his ties with the IRA. Three years later, hearing that he felt unsettled, they contacted him to see if he would go back into the ranks. However, by then, unknown to them, O’Callaghan had already contacted the Irish police, the Garda Síochána, and offered his services as an informer. When he was accepted back into the Provisionals’ ranks he rang his Garda handler to tell him: “We’re in.”
From the frenetic activism (both political and paramilitary) of the 1981 hunger strikes to the end of that decade, O’Callaghan betrayed arms shipments, foiled robberies and identified IRA weapons hides. Even while he was being tasked to set up bombing operations in England, most notably the Prince Charles/Princess Diana plot, O’Callaghan was also rising up the republican movement’s ranks politically. In 1985 he was elected as a Sinn Féin councillor for Tralee urban district council. That year also saw a highly contentious episode, during which it is alleged that he shot dead another informer, John Corcoran. O’Callaghan always insisted that he tried to tip off his Garda handlers that Corcoran had been unmasked as a spy within the IRA. His critics raised questions continually as to why the Garda never charged O’Callaghan with Corcoran’s murder.
In 1988 he moved back to England. In a typically theatrical move, O’Callaghan walked straight into a police station in Tunbridge Wells to confess to the murders of Martin and Flanagan. From then onwards he remained in limbo, a prisoner in English and Northern Irish jails, living outside the RUC witness protection programme offered to him, until his release in 1996.
After telling his story to the Sunday Times of how he had worked as an informer, initially for the Irish state, O’Callaghan was granted a pardon under the prerogative of mercy by Queen Elizabeth in 1997. The following year he published his book.
Although O’Callaghan was dismissed by some media commentators as a fantasist, Garret FitzGerald, the former taoiseach, confirmed that he was regularly briefed on intelligence reports from O’Callaghan to the Garda. FitzGerald described him as one of the most important agents of the state inside the IRA.
O’Callaghan was free again just as the peace process was starting to bed down and his former comrades in Sinn Féin entered negotiations with their old unionist enemies and the Westminster government. O’Callaghan decided to offer his services to David Trimble, the then Ulster Unionist leader, whose support would prove critical to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Hated by his former comrades, O’Callaghan acted as an adviser to Trimble on how to handle the republican movement, and so also outraged some traditional unionists who could not forgive a man with the blood of men and women on his hands. When he turned up in 1999 to a unionist conference called to debate whether unionism should take a gamble and go into government with Sinn Féin, there was uproar among members of the Orange Order and ugly scenes ensued.
For journalists who knew him, O’Callaghan could often be a useful source in tapping into the thinking and strategy of what became known as “pro-agreement unionism”.
At one critical juncture in July 1997, just after the Provisionals murdered two police officers in Trimble’s Upper Bann constituency, O’Callaghan, sensing a second IRA ceasefire was on its way, sent the Ulster Unionist party leader a fax. It urged him and the party not to pull out of the tortuous talks process that would lead to the peace deal on Good Friday the following year.
“I basically urged him not to walk out of the talks, because at that time he was on the edge of going. It was getting very difficult for him to remain, even though he didn’t want to go. In the fax … I said he should stay in the process and open up dialogue with the Catholic Church, have consultations with his own party and other unionists and nationalists. My advice was to have a stalling strategy, to take time out to consult,” O’Callaghan told me.
His deepening relationship with Trimble and his advice to pro-agreement unionism through the critical years of negotiation represented, according to O’Callaghan, one way of atoning for his past. Atonement was also probably his motivating factor in acting as an adviser to the families of the Omagh bomb massacre in 1998, especially in their civil action to sue those Real IRA leaders responsible for the single biggest atrocity of the Troubles. On learning of his death, Michael Gallagher, whose son, Aiden, was one of the 29 people killed, said: “My experience of Sean O’Callaghan was always a positive experience. He did a great deal to help the Omagh families get some form of justice.”
O’Callaghan is survived by a son he had with an Englishwoman and a daughter he had with a Scottish woman. He always thought that his past would eventually catch up with him in the form of a revenge attack on the streets of London or in his flat there. In the event he died in a swimming pool while visiting his daughter in Jamaica.