FACTS - The IRA ARE Sectarian

Following is an extract from an interview in the National Review with former IRA chief Sean O'Callaghan.
While some key quotes are highlighted, I'd advise that you read ALL of this.

Cover Story, National Review,  Jan 27, 1997
by Sean O'Callaghan


A former terrorist describes his life in the IRA, and looks at the current peace negotiations through the prism of what he learned in his old life.

I WAS born in 1954 in Tralee, County Kerry, in the Irish Republic. It was and still is an area with a strong republican tradition. After the treaty and the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 the IRA and the new Free State Army fought a bitter civil war. That war was conducted with great savagery in Kerry. Less than three miles from my parents' house, eight IRA prisoners were blown to pieces by government forces in an officially sanctioned reprisal for the earlier IRA murder of a Free State Army officer.

Civil war bitterness was still very much alive in parts of Kerry in the 1950s. My father's side of the family was steeped in that tradition. He and his brother, active IRA men, were interned without trial in the Curragh military camp in the early 1940s. My father, several aunts, and other family members have remained lifelong activists and supporters of the republican movement. That was the tradition and the family background into which I was born.

We were an ordinary working class family. We stood out in no regard other than that my father was a member of a small, essentially secret organization which still harboured dreams of a 32-county republic. They believed that such a republic would only come about by armed force. Occasionally I came across guns, and once explosives, hidden in the house. Sometimes there were meetings in the house or in my grandmother's. We were always sent somewhere else when anything of that nature was taking place but we had at least a vague idea that something exciting or dangerous was happening. We knew that nothing of this was ever to be repeated to our friends.

Like the great mass of Irish people I was educated in my early years at school by nuns and Christian Brothers. The Brothers had a fierce nationalist ethos. They saw themselves as the moral guardians of nationalist Ireland. It was a world of Gaelic games, the Irish language, and endless songs and stories about noble Irish patriots and treacherous English. The treachery of the English was at the root of all of Ireland's ills.

The 1916 rebellion was celebrated with great gusto in 1966, when I was 12 years old. RTE [Radio Telefis Eireann] television indulged in an orgy of adulation. Schools had special screenings of films on the rising. We played mock games of Irish versus the British. I always wanted to be James Connolly, the republican socialist executed by the British after the surrender of the rebels. Less than two years after these celebrations the civil-rights movement in Northern Ireland burst onto our television screens. In reality we understood little about the issues, but our sympathies were firmly with the Catholics in Northern Ireland. When sectarian violence broke out in Belfast in 1969 there was a huge outpouring of emotion in the Republic. Soon Catholic refugees were being billeted in local houses, church property, and the army barracks.

The IRA split, and the Provisional IRA was formed: an event which I now regard as the greatest tragedy in modern Irish history. That was not how I felt at the time, of course. I was 15 years old in 1970 and could not wait to enlist. My political views were certainly to the left of the leadership of the Provisional movement. Some of the overt militarism, bordering on fascism, did worry me. I saw the Provisionals as rather like a popular front which would sweep away partition and the British presence. We would then have a realignment of the Left in Irish politics. After that it was full steam down the road to the socialist republic. There you have the sum total of the political literacy of a 15-year-old would-be Irish revolutionary.

Like most others of my age in the Republic I knew nothing of Protestants or unionists other than that they were known as the Ascendancy. They stole the land from the Catholics and persecuted them. The Protestant working class in Northern Ireland were simply dupes of the unionist ruling classes and the British government. Our naivete and ignorance was incredible. We would throw the British out and then the poor stupid prods would see the error of their ways and join us in a new utopian Ireland. In truth we gave little or no consideration to the question of what to do with Protestants. We were ready to fight against the British just like our forefathers. This time we would finish the business. British rule in Ireland would end for all time.

I joined the IRA in Tralee. My family background was such that I had little difficulty in joining -- it was positively expected. It was not long before young IRA recruits in Northern Ireland were coming to Kerry for training in the use of weapons and explosives. Even though I was very young I found myself actively involved in this part of IRA activity. Needless to say, school appeared pretty boring by comparison and I soon lost interest in it.

The IRA recruits from Northern Ireland were in the main ordinary young men such as you would find in any British city, town, or rural area. They wore the same clothes, listened to the same music, and followed the same soccer clubs. They were more likely to spend their time arguing about the merits of Manchester United or Liverpool than politics. That came later, after exposure to the Provisional ideologues in Long Kesh and other prisons.

They saw their duty as protecting their areas -- Catholic ghettos in Belfast and Derry -- from attack by Protestants. The Provisional IRA was forged out of inter-communal sectarian warfare. The vast majority of the recruits had no coherent political outlook. They mainly despised politics. Youthful fascination with guns and bombs and a desire to get even with prods: that was their motivation. Ill-educated, ill-equipped, they were easy meat for the simple answer. The hard leadership of the Provisional IRA, mainly older men who had waited all their lives for the opportunity, gave them the guns and told them the Brits and unionists were to blame for all their problems.

The IRA gave these young men a sense of belonging, status in their community, and a purpose, a cause to believe in and to fight and die for. These were young men without much hope of employment who had seen their communities devastated in sectarian attacks. Now that they were hitting back their pride and dignity was restored. It would be utterly wrong to see these young men universally as lurid, evil psychopaths. That they carried out the most awful acts of violence is beyond question. But the real blame lies with their leadership: the old republican/nationalists who instilled discipline, obedience, and a reverence for republican structures and traditions that allowed young men to kill even former friends for minor transgressions of the republican code.

On April 20, 1972, I was preparing bomb equipment for a training camp due to begin within days. In the shed where I had been working seconds before, there was a major explosion. I escaped from the blast with just a few cuts and minor bruises but I was arrested and charged with possession of explosives. While I was on remand in Limerick prison the Dublin government introduced the non-jury special criminal court which sentenced me to six months. That was the sort of sentence IRA prisoners could expect in those days: there was still a lot of sympathy in the Republic. The British Embassy had been burned down in Dublin following Bloody Sunday in Derry.

When I was released I settled back into the same routine. One IRA meeting in Kerry in that period sticks in my mind. It was attended by a Dominican priest who came from Northern Ireland. There were perhaps thirty people present. The priest told us that British soldiers were raping Catholic women in Belfast. I did not really believe him, reasoning that if such activity was common the huge media circus then covering Northern Ireland could not miss it. Such pep talks hyped up the hate and allowed people to excuse the most awful atrocities committed by their own side.

In June 1973 I was sent to Donegal to work in an IRA bomb factory. The idea was for me to get experience and then train others so that more such factories could be set up further south. Like most IRA schemes in those days it never quite came to full fruition. I was soon back in Kerry but this time I was working for IRA General Headquarters Staff, running a training camp. Many IRA men who later became well-known figures passed through that camp. Some are dead, others are in jail, others, I suppose, have long since left the IRA.


In May 1974 I was sent to the Mid Ulster Brigade of the IRA. On May 2, along with up to forty IRA men from the East Tyrone Brigade, I took part in an attack on an army/UDR [Ulster Defense Regiment] base at the Deanery in Clogher, County Tyrone. There was a heavy gun battle which lasted up to twenty minutes before we withdrew. We made our way to safe houses over the border in Monaghan. It was not until we listened to the early morning radio news that we heard that a UDR Greenfinch named Eva Martin had been killed. It would be wrong to say that any of us were disappointed at the news.

I stayed in Tyrone until August of 1975. During that period I took part in about seventy attacks, mainly against members of the security forces. In one of those attacks, I along with two others murdered a detective inspector in the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] special branch called Peter Flanagan. We shot him dead in a public house in Omagh, County Tyrone. The two people who carried out this murder with me were both younger than me. Both were from Belfast. The driver was little more than a young girl. The other was 17 years old and had escaped from youth custody in Belfast while charged with murdering a soldier. He was arrested in 1975 and charged with attempted murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and is still in custody today. He was transferred to Northern Ireland and will probably be released in the next year or so. He has never been charged with the murder which he committed with me.

BY the time that I murdered Flanagan doubts were already forming in my mind about the real nature of the Provisional IRA. IRA volunteers in Tyrone were on the whole far more sectarian than I was or ever could be. Their Catholicism was of a virulent and hate-filled brand. It is, in retrospect, hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Militant Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism have a deep and complex relationship, nowhere more so than in rural areas of Northern Ireland like Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Armagh.

During this period I was involved in recruiting new IRA volunteers. One of our main safe houses was a parochial house outside Omagh. Sometimes we used that house to initiate new members. Imagine the effect on a young uneducated country lad brought to his parochial house under cover of darkness to be inducted into the IRA. Try telling him that the Church was not on his side. One of the local priests usually called on another house in that area where I and other IRA men often stayed. He took great delight in asking us to relate our latest escapades. He was also forever passing on information about local Protestants: usually members or ex-members of the UDR or RUC. At least one of these was later murdered by the Provisional IRA.

This was, in reality, a war against Protestants. There was a deep, ugly hatred, centuries old, behind all of this. The prods had the better farms, the better jobs that belonged by right to the Catholics, and they wanted them. If I wanted to attack a British army patrol or barracks, the local Provos wanted to shoot a part-time UDR or police reservist. They wanted to murder their neighbors. They wanted to drive the Protestants off the land and reclaim what they believed was their birthright. Gradually the reality was getting through to me. This was no romantic struggle against British imperialism but a squalid sectarian war directed against the Protestant people of Northern Ireland.

In March or April of 1975, I was in a flat in Monaghan town. The flat was a base for IRA men from the East Tyrone Brigade. That evening there were perhaps eight people, all full-time IRA activists, all on the run from Northern Ireland. I was making tea when a news item on the television about the death of an RUC woman in a bomb explosion was greeted with, "I hope she's pregnant and we get two for the price of one."

I felt utterly sickened and revolted. More so even when I realized who had spoken -- a Tyrone man who was second in command of the Provisional IRA and a man I held in the highest regard; a man to whom I had thought seriously about addressing my doubts and fears. I went to another room where I just wanted to cry my eyes out. That man later became the chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. He was chief of staff when the present peace process began. Small wonder that I have serious doubts about the Provisional IRA's commitment to peace.

Shortly afterward I went home to Tralee and resigned quietly from the IRA. I just cited personal reasons. People probably thought I was just tired and needed a break. I was not yet 21. Shortly after, I went to London where I started an office and industrial cleaning business and got married. I kept in touch with events in Ireland and wondered what to do, if anything, about what I had been involved in.

THE hatred of informers is burned so deep in the Irish nationalist psyche as to be almost incomprehensible to people not from that tradition. Informers had always betrayed the Irish. Whenever the Irish plotted a rebellion, the English had an informer to warn them. In my family the postman was regarded as a potential police informer. The fear, hatred, and loathing is impossible to explain. Yet that is what I decided to become, and I am glad I did.

My wife and I moved to Ireland in 1979 and I quickly rejoined the IRA. As soon as I had done so I contacted a detective whom I knew to be efficient, tight-mouthed, and opposed politically and morally to the Provisional IRA. I worked with him for six years. It was a time of often frantic activity for me and there were few areas of Sinn Fein or IRA activity that I did not gain access to in those years.

We had many successes against the IRA in that period. Some I can mention now, others have to wait for another day. My work brought me into contact with almost every IRA department and most republican leaders. We broke up and captured IRA training camps, foiled many IRA operations. One was a plot to kill the Prince and Princess of Wales at a charity concert in the Dominion Theatre in the West End of London during the British general election in 1983. It was also intended that I should plant 16 small bombs on beaches. This was based on a similar type of operation carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA on Spanish beaches.

The plot to murder the prince and princess was intended as retaliation for the deaths of the hunger strikers of 1981. I was to place a bomb containing roughly twenty pounds of frangex in the toilet at the rear of the royal box. I went into the theater and knew the plan was feasible. Buried behind tiles and equipped with a 32-day delay timer it would have killed or injured anybody in the immediate area. The Garda officer that I worked with came secretly to Liverpool to see me. We devised a plan which we hoped would foil the attacks and allow me to avoid IRA suspicion and continue to work against them.

A couple of evenings later Scotland Yard called a late night news conference. Knowing that it was to take place I left England and went to France the day before. Commander William Hucklesby, then in charge of the anti-terrorist squad, named me and said that I was part of an IRA team ready to kill a prominent politician in the run-up to the election.

In such a manner the attack was averted and I was able to return to Ireland, reputation enhanced, having escaped the clutches of the enemy. There was so much activity in that period that I can only give a general account here. Another event should serve to give some idea of the damage done to the IRA in this period. In 1984 the Provisional IRA invested a lot of time and money in America. They conspired with a gang of drug smugglers, pimps, and loan sharks from the Boston area to assemble a large quantity of weapons and smuggle them to Ireland. They spent about $2 million putting the shipment of some seven tons of arms, ammunition and explosives together. In September a trawler called the Valhalla sailed from the Boston area heading for Ireland. On board, along with some of the Boston gang, was a former U.S. Marine and now IRA volunteer.

Waiting for the Valhalla off the Kerry coast in an area known as the porcupine bank was a smaller Kerry-based trawler called the Marita Ann. I kept the Garda informed of every detail about the operation. After the weapons were loaded onto the Marita Ann, an operation mostly overseen by an RAF Nimrod, it headed for the Kerry coast. It was ambushed by an Irish navy frigate with Garda officers on board. All the weapons were recovered, and the crew captured. On board was one of the most senior men in the IRA. Also there was the Marine, who had come with the Valhalla. Its crew were later arrested in America, along with other members of the gang who had conspired to gather the weapons.

I WAS particularly pleased to have played a major part in foiling such a dangerous IRA plot. Irish-American romantic views of Ireland have contributed greatly to the Provisional IRA's capacity to murder. I was glad that this time their bloody and ill-considered plans had come to nothing.

By 1985 I was responsible for the IRA in the south of Ireland. That meant that I was a member of the IRA's GHQ staff, the grouping that runs the IRA on a daily basis. This brought me into daily contact with many of the IRA leadership. I was familiar with most aspects of IRA activity, finance, engineering, training, and the England department in particular. I also met the chief of staff almost weekly. He was the man from County Tyrone who had hoped the dead policewoman was pregnant.

I was also a member of the Sinn Fein national executive. That brought me into regular contact with people such as Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and Pat Doherty. It is interesting now to recall my impressions of those national executive meetings and the personalities so prominent in the present peace process. Everybody knew nothing of any real importance would be decided at those meetings. Sinn Fein is not like normal democratic parties. The decisions that matter are taken elsewhere, by the IRA army council.

What struck me most of all was the degree of control exercised at those meetings by Adams and McGuinness. The level of political debate was very poor. Imagine a group of student Trots addicted to romantic nationalism and the whole thing glued together by the most awful elitism. I sometimes wondered what the reaction of Labour MPs and supporters in Britain -- who seemed to see the Provisionals as akin to the ANC -- would have been to the awful drivel that passed for political debate among the republican leadership behind closed doors.

Early in 1981, my wife and I separated. We remained good friends and divorced amicably in 1987. In late 1981 I met and fell in love with an English woman who lived in Kerry. Our daughter was born in June 1985, one week after I was elected as a Sinn Fein local councilor in Tralee. Later that year it became obvious that I was being viewed with a certain amount of suspicion by some local republicans. I took a backward step but realized that sooner rather than later I was going to have to answer some very difficult questions: my girlfriend also. Being English was not going to help her.

I decided that it was time to move. We left Ireland in November of that year and stayed in England over Christmas. I was introduced by the Metropolitan police to MI-5 in London in January, and moved at their request to Holland. My girlfriend and daughter joined me a couple of weeks later. I met the MI-5 for regular debriefing sessions until September 1986, and we returned to England in November of that year.

Two years later I walked into Tunbridge Wells police station in Kent and admitted my involvement in the two murders committed in Northern Ireland in 1974. Two RUC officers came to the station the next day and I returned to Northern Ireland with them that evening.

My reasons for giving myself up were fairly straightforward. I wanted to give evidence against the IRA leadership in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. I had no doubt that had I been allowed to I could have crippled the IRA's capacity to murder people. It quickly became apparent to me, if not to the RUC officers dealing with the case, that I was never going to be allowed to give evidence. I can only speculate as to the reasons. In May 1990 I pleaded guilty at Belfast Crown Court to the two murders and sixty or so related terrorist attacks which I had carried out in Tyrone in 1974 - 75. I was sentenced to life imprisonment plus five hundred or so years in total. I am now in Maghaberry prison in Northern Ireland where I am held in a special unit set aside for people at serious risk from paramilitary organizations. I am not allowed to write or speak publicly in any detail about this, or indeed about my time in prison in general. Were I to do so it is possible that I would not be allowed to write publicly again while in prison.

I now spend my time writing, which is what I have always wanted to do. While working against the IRA it was not possible for me to say or write what I wanted to or read the books I wanted to read --that was a hard part of it, spending all my time in the company of people I either disliked or loathed. I am working on some poetry, some short stories, and a novel, which I hope will shed some light on the real nature of extreme Irish nationalism. I am also working on a book about my time in the IRA.

For now, I am frightened about the peace process, about where it is taking us. I spend my time explaining to people prepared to listen just what it is that the Provisional IRA are up to. Provisionalism is nothing more than extreme nationalism, an ugly creation that will not be appeased. The real target is Irish nationalism, north and south of the border. I remember the days when the Provisional leadership seriously discussed killing John Hume [leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party], regarding him and the SDLP as the only thing stopping their domination of Northern nationalists.

They are a little more sophisticated now. They will kill him instead with kindness and soft words of ceasefire and compromises. They intend to poison Irish nationalism until no compromise with unionists is possible. They want to be the conscience of Irish nationalism, forcing nationalists to move further to the extreme to keep the nationalist consensus alive. People in Britain would do well to remember these words: far from being a democratic socialist organization, the Provisionals are a collection of extreme nationalists, neo-Stalinists, and thinly disguised fascists. What holds them together is hatred of the British and unionists.

Gerry Adams's concept of a pan-nationalist front is the most dangerous strategy ever devised by the Provisionals and has within it the potential for violence on a scale at least as bad as anything that has gone before. We are far from peace and far away from any solution to the problems of Northern Ireland.

Instead of moving forward we are moving back into tribalism. The Provisionals have no intention of compromising with unionists. They see the problem as the unionist problem. They want to use a nationalist alliance to force the British government to abandon unionists. Then they can be dealt with. I wish I could be confident about the future, but I have sat behind too many closed doors with too many of the present leadership to be fooled by the smooth presentation.

I would like to finish by paying tribute to Conor Cruise O'Brien. When I found myself questioning my deeply held beliefs in the mid 1970s, I did not have the intellectual capacity to formulate my thoughts clearly. His speeches and his writings were giving form to my questions. Without his unknowing help I could never have pulled myself away from the fundamentalist slime. He is also surely the bravest intellectual in the history of the Irish Republic. Agree or disagree with him, his courage can surely not be questioned.

Today I am neither nationalist nor unionist. They are essentially tribal terms and I want no part of tribalism. I am concerned that people should be allowed to make their choices free from fear and aggression. Therefore I am for peace and against pan-nationalism