As for this author, please refer to my previous postings（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=Douglas+Murray+）. (Lily)
The Sunday Times（https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news-review/the-ira-killer-ready-to-save-me-ftshlp9tp）
by Douglas Murray
27 August 2017
The IRA killer ready to save me
Sean O’Callaghan, who died last week, was a double agent and sabotaged numerous attacks. Douglas Murray became his friend and recalls being in a tight spot with him
When he was 20 years old Sean O’Callaghan did a terrible thing. In August 1974 he walked into a pub in Omagh and shot Royal Ulster Constabulary detective inspector Peter Flanagan repeatedly as he was having lunch at the bar. Earlier that year O’Callaghan had taken part in a rocket and gun attack on a British Army base in Co Tyrone causing the death of 28-year-old Eva Martin, a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment.
O’Callaghan, born into an IRA family in Co Kerry in 1954, from his boyhood had drunk deeply from the wells of republican resentment and romance. Years later he would recall one typical schoolboy discussion: “Is it better to live for Ireland or to die for Ireland?” At 15 he joined the Provisional IRA which led him to that Tyrone base and Omagh bar.
It was a path he could not stay on. This early school leaver began to read and think for himself. He also listened. While he was with other IRA members in March 1975 news came on the television of the murder of a policewoman by an IRA cell in Bangor. One of O’Callaghan’s comrades said: “Maybe she was pregnant and we got two for the price of one.” O’Callaghan was out.
Hatred of his former cause was not enough, however. In 1979 he rejoined the IRA, having already volunteered to report back to the Irish garda. For years he maintained this terrifying double life at great cost to the family life he was starting. As he rose through the ranks of the IRA he had access to more and more vital information. By the time he became head of Southern Command he was the most important asset the Irish or British authorities had within the terrorist organisation. At constant risk to himself he fed back information that stopped numerous attacks, including the attempted assassination in 1983 of the Prince and Princess of Wales. All the while O’Callaghan was sabotaging these sorts of operations, his own cover became more difficult to maintain.
Fearing it was about to blown, he went to England but could not step away from his past or the rending guilt over what he had done. In 1988 he walked into a police station in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and handed himself in for the murders of Peter Flanagan and Eva Martin. He was convicted and sentenced to 539 years in prison.
After eight years he was freed by royal prerogative. Through appeals to a small cohort of remarkable journalists and others, the story of what O’Callaghan had done became known. On his release from prison he wrote a devastating memoir — The Informer — revealing him to be not only the most high-profile double agent in the IRA but also the most senior opponent of their ideology ever to have emerged from their ranks.
In the years that followed he regularly gave evidence against his former organisation, including for this newspaper during its 1998 successful libel defence against the senior IRA activist Thomas “Slab” Murphy. The IRA responded in familiar fashion, trying to pour slurry over every aspect of O’Callaghan’s account and life. But O’Callaghan had the advantages of truth, a devastating insight into a murderous organisation and a profound desire to atone. I got to know him during the years when he lived secretively in England. He knew that if he returned to Ireland he would be murdered in the same fashion as far lower-level informers. Yet even on the mainland his life remained at risk.
One day he was stepping out of the shower when the phone rang. A Special Branch officer asked what he was wearing. “Not much,” he replied. “Well, you’re going to need to get out anyway,” he was told. A nearby workman had seen him going in and out of the flat, recognised him and knew who to call. O’Callaghan was offered state protection but refused. Not because of bravado but because, as he sometimes said, he had no desire to spend the rest of his life sitting between two minders watching old Clint Eastwood movies.
He wanted to live and did so with a passion for friendship as well as truth. For many years friendship with him revolved around drink. Afternoons would drag into evenings and closing time to finding anywhere still open. He attracted a magnificent awkward-squad group of friends: argumentative historians, prominent politicians, former policemen, students and waifs and strays he guided and encouraged.
Obituaries have referred to his slight, haunted appearance. He had reason for both. But he would never have attracted the friends only because of his fascinating past. O’Callaghan was just wonderful to be around: one of the smartest, best-read, unimpressible, caring, generous people you could meet. He rarely had money, but when he did he would give it away.
Some years ago he sensed I was getting into trouble (after putting my head above a different parapet) and that one speaking event in particular might turn dangerous. On the day he insisted on accompanying me and, as we turned a corner, we saw 100 bearded Islamists (many now in prison or dead) waiting for me. He must have felt my gulp because he put his corduroy-jacketed arm through mine, looked me in the eyes and said: “Douglas, mate. There are undoubtedly a lot more of them than there are of us. But don’t forget I can be extremely nasty in a corner.” Luckily the police showed up before he had to demonstrate this.
Hunger strikes had caused havoc with his insides and on the rare occasions he ate he did so like an animal testing out something unusual. He smoked heavily, ripping the filters off his cigarettes before lighting them up. A few years ago he suddenly gave up drink. I asked why. “There are just a couple of things I really, really need to do before I die,” he said.
One was achieved in his 2015 biography of the republican hero James Connolly. O’Callaghan was obsessed with getting to the roots of dangerous ideologies — an impulse that fuelled his interest in other forms of extremism and his volunteer work with young people in gangs. Connolly’s writings were at the base of the poison tree that had produced the young O’Callaghan.
And so he spent what proved to be his last years going back, devastatingly and methodically, to dig at those roots in the hope he might stop that tree bearing fruit. Perhaps fulfilling one of his other ambitions of recent years, he was in Jamaica visiting his daughter last week when his heart stopped. He was 63.
Britain and Ireland took O’Callaghan — and the lives he saved — slightly for granted. His friends never did and none will forget the debt we owe him or the pride we felt in him. Alongside the heroism and the friendship, his life holds out one other hope: that whether or not it’s the only one we get, atonement can be reached for and perhaps even achieved in this life.
@DouglasKMurray
・Douglas Murray is the author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
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