THERE is little doubt that Sean O'Callaghan, who comes from a republican family in Tralee and became a close associate of the IRA leaders, was one of the most important IRA informants ever recruited by the Garda.
Although they refuse to comment, it is privately accepted by senior Garda sources that O'Callaghan was a very active and senior IRA figure before apparently volunteering to work as an informant.
He gave the Garda information which led to the seizure of seven tons of weapons on board the Marita Ann off Kerry in 1985. The shipment included 91 rifles, eight machineguns, 13 shotguns, 51 handguns, rockets, grenades and 76,000 rounds of ammunition. The local IRA leader, Martin Ferris, was arrested on board the ship.
The IRA believed the Marita Ann shipment had been compromised from within the republican movement in Boston, where local republicans and Irish American criminals had gathered the weapons. John McIntyre, one of the minor figures in a group described as the Irish mafia in Boston, was abducted and is believed to have been murdered, although his body was never found.
O'Callaghan, who had been working as an informant for the Garda for several years, continued to be an important figure in the south western brigade of the IRA for another year.
In March 1985 the IRA abducted one of its Cork members, John Corcoran, after suspicion fell on him when a group of IRA men were arrested during a robbery.
In an interview with the Boston Globe two years ago, O'Callaghan told of how he found himself holding Corcoran, an epileptic and father of eight children, in a farm building in Co Cork. For two days, O'Callaghan said, he tried to get word to his Garda handlers to have the shed raided and Corcoran released. At the same time he was receiving orders from the IRA chief of staff to kill Corcoran.
After two days, Corcoran was shot in the head. His body was found on March 23rd wrapped in a sleeping bag.
O'Callaghan was not charged in connection with this incident. However, it nearly weighed heavily on him. Within a few months he had left Ireland for England. There, he says, he was passed into the care of MI5 which moved him to a safe house in Holland.
After three years of this isolated life, O'Callaghan walked into a Kent police station and said he wanted to admit his part in two murders and a series of attacks in Northern Ireland.
In May 1990 he appeared before Belfast Crown Court and was sentenced to life imprisonment after he admitted a total of 42 charges. His prison sentence totalled 539 years. His role in helping the Garda against the IRA has apparently secured his release after only eight years.
The murders O'Callaghan admitted were of Eva Martin, a 28 year old Ulster Defence Regiment member who was killed when the IRA launched an attack on Clogher RUC barracks, in Co Tyrone, in May 1974. Mrs Martin was shot dead on the stairs of the barracks. She was found by her husband, Richard, who tripped over her body as he made his way down the darkened staircase. She died in his arms.
The other murder was of Supt Peter Flanagan, a Catholic RUC officer and head of the Special Branch in Omagh, Co Tyrone, on August 23rd, 1974. Flanagan was described by colleagues as a trusting man who, despite the threat to his life, still drank regularly in a pub in the town. O'Callaghan and other IRA men burst into the pub and shot him dead.
The IRA unit which O'Callaghan joined was based in Monaghan town. Earlier in 1974 it had abducted and killed Cormac McCabe, a captain in the UDR. McCabe, the headmaster of Aughnacloy Secondary School, was abducted from the Four Seasons Hotel in Monaghan on January 20th, 1974, tortured and then shot dead two days later. His body was dumped just inside Northern Ireland on a road leading to Clogher.
Gardai arrested O'Callaghan and the rest of the local IRA unit in a safe house in Monaghan later that year. O'Callaghan was in the company of six other men, including an IRA figure from Scotstown, Co Monaghan, who later became the chief of staff of the IRA.
The Monaghan based unit was extremely active and very dangerous. O'Callaghan describes his associates as violent and sectarian. When they returned from the attack on Clogher RUC station, he recollects, the man who later became the IRA chief of staff remarked that it was a pity Mrs Martin was not pregnant as "we would have got two for the price of one".
O'Callaghan also says that after the murder of Supt Flanagan he and his associates were hidden in a parochial house by a priest who praised their work and described the dead police officer as a "traitor".
During the last few years, O'Callaghan has spoken to reporters who visited him in Maghaberry Prison about his life and activities.
A consistent theme in his interviews over the past two years has been that the "peace process" and the IRA's ceasefire are a sham. He says the IRA's intention is to call a ceasefire before the next British general election, usurp the SDLP as the majority nationalist party in Northern Ireland and then relaunch its military campaign to create a major security crisis.
"The IRA peace strategy was always an attack on constitutional nationalism. The prize Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness value above all others is to displace the SDLP as the dominant voice of Northern nationalists. If that happens, violence on a scale never seen before will be unavoidable. It is that serious," he says.
"Irish nationalists must wake up to the serious danger that the Provisionals represent before it is too late.
"People like me are horrified by the naivety of some well intentioned nationalist leaders. The influence that the IRA exerts on Irish nationalists is at an all time high. Sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland is at an all time high. Is that a complete coincidence?
"As the IRA's influence increases, civil war looms. The evidence is staring us in the face. The peace process has been a disaster for long term peace. The IRA peace strategy has been a resounding success for Adams and his fellow conspirators."
In this mode O'Callaghan, who is in the process of producing an autobiography, has become something of a Banquo's ghost at the peace process dinner table.
Senior security sources agree with O'Callaghan about the threat from the IRA, but disagree with his final analysis.
They accept that the IRA will continue to be a revolutionary organisation which will almost certainly continue to prepare for war. But there is a continuing acceptance that Adams and McGuinness and the majority within the Provisional movement do not want to return to all out conflict.
During the last few years of the conflict in Northern Ireland before the IRA ceasefire, republicans were under almost daily attack from reinvigorated loyalist paramilitaries. More republicans were assassinated by loyalists in the last four years of the conflict than in the previous 21 years.
The conflict in Northern Ireland had descended into a round of ethnic violence and would return to this almost immediately if the IRA seriously began its campaign again in Northern Ireland.
O'Callaghan is probably right, security sources say, in identifying his former associate, the now IRA chief of staff, as one of the main opponents of a proper peace process. This man, local sources say, is deeply anti Protestant and anti British and would almost certainly revel in a return to sectarian conflict.
He, however, has not had to contend with the almost permanent threat from loyalist assassination under which many of his counterparts in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland lived. The war, it is pointed out, never came to his door.
O'Callaghan's views are those of a man who first fought and killed for the IRA and then became one of its biggest betrayers. His bitterness against the IRA is almost certainly compounded by the killing of John Corcoran.
O'Callaghan told the Boston Globe: "I took the mask off him. It was just the most pathetic sight. To the very end, I was hoping the guards would come through the door, just take Corcoran and his wife away somewhere, give them a new life, a new identity."
The judge at O'Callaghan's trial summed him up, saying: "I believe that bitterness, remorse and despair await those who wantonly take the lives of others and that they eventually find themselves unable to live a normal life.
"Being caught is not the only punishment. Punishment can come from within and, I believe, whatever you may say yourself that you have been affected by what you have done."
O'Callaghan remains a lonely figure, isolated permanently from the republican community in which he grew up and which turned him into a killer. He is in England living in hiding, emerging fleetingly to give interviews. He is on a crusade against the republican movement which he blames for letting this happen to him.
