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The Informer by Sean O'Callaghan Bantam Press 340 pages Stg£16.99
by Austen Morgan________________Sean O'Callaghan, one of the greatest friends of peace in Ireland, was once a leading member of the Provisional IRA. He was released from prison at the end of 1996. Now, in The Informer (a title evocative of Liam O'Flaherty's novel of the War of Independence filmed by John Ford in 1935), he tells his story. And a cracking story it is, tending to a pulp non-fiction style.
O'Callaghan's book, however, stands out in the emerging genre of critical autobiographies of contemporary Irish republicanism for its astute humanism. Born in Tralee in Co. Kerry in 1954 to an uncommunicating father who had been interned during the war, and a tolerant mother (unlike his paternal grandmother, who urged never trust a policeman, even a dead one. They should be dug up and shot again just to be sure ). He joined the IRA in the Republic - during adolescent rebellion - early in the Troubles.
He became a full-time volunteer in 1973, and was later sent to Mid-Ulster as a training officer. In an attack in Clogher, Eva Martin, an off-duty, part-time woman soldier, was killed; O'Callaghan had manned the mortar launcher. In August 1974, he shot dead Peter Flanagan a Catholic Special Branch officer, who was reading his Irish Independent over a lunchtime drink in an Omagh pub.
The naked sectarianism of northern Republicans drove O'Callaghan out of the movement in 1975. He tells the story of Kevin McKenna, later Chief of Staff of the IRA, saying of a policewoman killed by a bomb in Bangor: maybe she was pregnant and we got two for the price of one. Four years later, with Scottish wife and son, he returned from London to Tralee to work for the Irish police as an informer inside the IRA. He rose to become OC of Southern Command, and a member of the national executive of Sinn Féin.
O'Callaghan's role in preventing the assassination of the Prince and Princess of Wales in London in 1983 is corroborated by the then Taoiseach, Garrett Fitzgerald. His role in revealing the Marita Ann shipment of 7 tons of weaponry from the United States is also credible. After 6 years of what he calls working inside my own head, he quit Ireland for a second time.
In 1988, seeking to do further damage to the IRA by a war of expiation, he walked into a police station in Tunbridge Wells to give himself up. He was given two life sentences (and 539 years for 44 other offences) in Belfast, but was to be granted the royal prerogative of pardon after 8 years.
The book contains revelations: about Communist-bloc connections, and the £2 million from Syria after the killing of Lord Mountbatten in 1979; how Sinn Féin Vice-President Gerry Adams discussed killing John Hume shortly before Adams was elected to Westminster; and further information on the three successful Libyan arms shipments (which seem to have convinced the Irish and British governments that the IRA could not be militarily defeated).
It is no revelation that Sinn Féin and the IRA are, in Tony Blair's words, inextricably linked. It was the IRA which ordered O'Callaghan to stand as a Sinn Féin candidate in Tralee, just as the Army recently permitted its members in Sinn Féin to take their seats in the new Northern Ireland assembly, if elected. This book will make it more difficult for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who are described as responsible for mass murder, to continue denying any association with the threat and use of force.
The Informer is weakest on O'Callaghan's motives. While he writes about working inside his own head, emotional and practical reality is often obscured by contemporary commitment. Was he such a strong critic from the age of 20? And did he become an informer and, more importantly, give himself up, simply to wage a one-man fight against his former associates in the IRA? The Informer is, nevertheless, the best work in progress on the lethally sick, sad world of republicanism.
This has been supported, not endorsed, by the political culture of the Republic. The Irish constitution, until amendment in the May 22nd referendum, arguably allowed for a united Ireland pursued by violent means. The boys, as the IRA was cosily known by far too many people, was the precondition for the execration of the informer in politics and literary culture. It is to O'Callaghan's credit that he has addressed this issue. He worked for the Irish police, for no reward; was debriefed by MI5 at the request of his Irish contact, and refused to accept the new (British) identity and assistance to which he was entitled on release from Maghaberry prison.
He has worked energetically, alone and with others, to expose the IRA's colonisation of peace. "Gradually," O'Callaghan writes, "a more definable framework of democrats, human rights activists and people who understood that working for peace entailed more than lighting candles, admirable though it is, emerged." The book is dedicated to organisations which "stood up to the terrorists". Even this work, with a postscript dated 14 April, which points to the hopeful scenario of David Trimble leading a majority of Unionists, and IRA/Sinn Féin being boxed into a corner, risks being overtaken by events. Nevertheless, in the coming weeks, as Adams and McGuinness, as revolutionary nationalists, seek to enter the new (shadow) executive in Northern Ireland without doing anything to build confidence (especially among Unionist No voters), The Informer will be an indispensable almanac of where they are coming from.
Austen Morgan was David Trimble's legal adviser at the
recent peace talks. This review was first published in The Observer on
May 31, 1998