(by Steven King, Belfast Telegraph)

The delicate demographic balance was very nearly upset at the weekend. Reading that David Trimble has applied for a parliamentary pass for an ex-Provo was nearly enough for many unionists to choke on their Ulster fries.

Sean O'Callaghan's CV is hardly conventional. From Kerry, he was brought up to believe the IRA were freedom fighters with a sacred mission to drive the British out of Ireland. So at the age of 15 after months of watching the Troubles unfurl on television, he joined and by 18 he was a fulltime revolutionary, involved with people who are now senior Sinn Fein politicians in training Northern volunteers.

He was 19 when he crossed the border and became a terrorist in East Tyrone. Among his crimes was his involvement in a mortar attack on the Clogher army base in which a UDR Greenfinch was killed and the cold-blooded murder in Omagh of DI Peter Flanagan, whom the IRA leadership falsely accused of torturing republican suspects.

Sounds like just the sort of person not to have about the place. Except that is not the full story. Sean O'Callaghan gradually woke up to the fact that the IRA were not resistance fighters at all but sectarian fascists. His thoughts crystallised when he was listening to the radio with a future IRA Chief of Staff. The news reported that a policewoman had been killed in Bangor. O'Callaghan's IRA boss laughed and exclaimed: "Maybe she was pregnant and we got two for the price of one."

Horrified, O'Callaghan realised that he had spent five years committing evil. He left the IRA but his conscience drove him to rejoin as an unpaid agent for the gardai. Later he gave himself up and served eight years, being released on royal prerogative in 1996.

Some people will say once a Fenian, always a Fenian. Never mind that Sean O'Callaghan has saved innumerable innocent lives (including those of the Prince and Princess of Wales) and put dozens of terrorists in jail. Never mind that in articles, interviews and his fine book, The Informer, O'Callaghan has revealed the vicious, squalid reality of violent nationalism. Never mind that Sean O'Callaghan's life is dedicated to opposing terrorism and to trying to save young people from making the dreadful mistake he made himself when, through misplaced idealism, he joined the IRA.

By giving Sean O'Callaghan a pass to spread his message further around Westminster David Trimble has shown that he means it when he says that having a past doesn't mean you needn't have a future. He has shown that he is happy to have Catholics about the house or, in this case, the House.

But if you were one of those who nearly choked, just imagine the reaction in Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Pat Doherty's breakfast rooms. Why do I think that as they wander around Westminster trying to grab as many hands to shake as they can, Sean O'Callaghan's hand will not be among them?

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Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy, the BBC's contribution to our national Holocaust commemoration, last Friday, gave the performance of his TV, if not his film, career - better even than that in the Billy plays. If talent like that can come out of north Belfast only half a mile from where novelist Brian Moore grew up, the city deserves the accolade of European city of culture.

Playing Nazi exterminator-general Reinhard Heydrich, Branagh gripped the viewer in a tour de force as he was shown pulling together conflicting German interests at the 1942 meeting in Berlin which put in train the obliteration of European Jewry.

As Heydrich skilfully drove the meeting forward with just a little menace (and Eichmann arranging the cuisine), the German military and political elites duly signed up to the industrialised murder of millions of Jews. Even Belfast's Jewish population was mentioned. Thus was the culture of the continent irrevocably impoverished.

Ironically it was also in north Belfast, in the mid 1970s, that anti-Semitism resurfaced when the Provisional IRA's new 'anti-capitalist' policy took a disproportionate toll on Jewish businesses.

Branagh reminded us that a modern bureaucracy can do anything it likes once set a task. Only democracy, a free press and the willingness of enough individuals to be contrary can ensure evil does not get to make policy.

Steven King is political adviser to The Rt. Hon. David Trimble MP MLA. This article appeared in the January 31, 2002 edition of the Belfast Telegraph .

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