Who is perhaps the most distrusted, even reviled Irishman alive today? He is far more disliked than any of the IRA leaders whose hands have been incarnadined with the blood of the legions of the innocent; yet many who detest the IRA detest Sean O'Callaghan more. He saved scores, maybe hundreds of lives, so why do people prefer to be suspicious of him and his motives than to analyse why they feel that way?
Maybe the answer is simple enough. The cultural aversion to the creature "the informer" runs deep in the Irish psyche, not least because the moral equivalence which prompts people to become informers is widespread throughout Irish life, like an undertow endlessly sucking people towards evasion of personal duty. The regime of Charles J. Haughey, which so debauched the political health of this republic, could only have been made possible within a political culture of profound moral equivalence.
Traditionally, the figure of the informer is the acme of moral equivalence, with its archetype standing as Leonard McNally, the bicentenary of whose infamous deeds we mark this year. McNally was a truly vile man who as a leading member of the United Irishmen induced, wheedled and cajoled people into taking the United Irishman's oath. He then informed on them, and then, worst of all, in the guise of acting as their counsel, would extract further damning information from them, thereby hastening their journey to the gallows.
The model informer
This poacher-who-is-in-reality-gamekeeper is the model informer in Irish life. All informers in Irish folklore have been modelled on the McNally-type figure; the perception that the informer is the true betrayer, the Judas of Judases, permitted the IRA to do such terrible things to people it suspected of being informers, with little general outcry. Remember the shameful supinity of the government response to the abduction and murder of Tom Oliver, whose crime in IRA eyes was that he gave information to the lawful police force of this state?
A widespread culture of moral equivalence, co-existing with an equally widespread delusory self-image of moral rectitude, prompts this hatred of the informer. For what we fear most about the informers is not what they stand for in the wider community, but what they stand for within ourselves - that inner willingness to submit to circumstance, to capitulate to the greater power, to propitiate rather than to oppose, to appease rather than to resist. Within this ethos, no fate is too terrible for the informer, just as no fate is too terrible for that part of ourselves we despise most of all. Our profound cultural loathing of informers is really pathological and chronic self-hatred.
A servant of the state
The modern truth is the opposite of this traditional cultural perception. The informer in a democracy is a servant of the state; though of course I am not so naive as to think that informers operate out of a sense of the commonweal. Most operate out of expediency or financial self-interest. Principle is a rare ingredient in informers; yet it is hard to see what other motive but principle caused Sean O'Callaghan to operate within the very heart of the IRA, meanwhile informing to the Garda Siochana.
We may take it from no less a figure than Garret FitzGerald, the then Taoiseach, that Sean O'Callaghan was central to the abortion of a plot to assassinate Prince Charles and Diana. Had those killings actually occurred, they might well have done for Anglo-Irish relations what the assassination of an earlier crown prince and his similarly morganatic consort, the Duchess of Hohenberg, did for Austro-Serbian accord. The consequences for civilised life on this island would have been beyond prediction.
If loyalists had then attacked nationalist areas in reply, I suspect the British army and the RUC might have done no more than salute as they passed. That aside, the debt owed to Sean O'Callaghan for his role in the seizure of the vessel the Marita Anna with its seven tons of weaponry is huge. We can never know how many lives were saved because of that interception. But we do know one outcome of that affair. On the one hand, Martin Ferris, who helped smuggle those weapons which might have caused so much death and misery in this country and who was imprisoned for this trouble, got a very large first preference vote in Kerry in the last general election. On the other, the man who prevented that slaughter is in exile and in constant fear of his life from Ferris's former comrades. That surely is a subversion of natural justice: but then Sean O'Callaghan subverts many things.
Moral absolutism
That is why he makes so many people uncomfortable; because he subverts the traditional and reassuring cultural stereotype of the informer, who betrays for selfish reasons. Far from being a paradigm for moral equivalence, Sean O'Callaghan is as morally absolutist as the most dedicated of terrorists, which of course he once was. The same moral absolutism caused him to become an informer, with all the abominable risks that that entailed.
Presumably it was the same moral absolutism which later drove Sean O'Callaghan to giving himself up. Sean O'Callaghan killed a man in cold blood, and he repents. His acts of repentance, which have saved uncountable lives, have not made him a hero, but caused him to be widely distrusted. That distrust asks questions of more than Sean O'Callaghan; much more importantly, it asks far larger questions of a society which harbours it.