EAMON COLLINS rose briefly to public attention around 1984 as the last of the RUC's "supergrass" witnesses against the IRA. He implicated a group of men from the Newry and Armagh area in murders but recanted. Eventually most of the charges including the five murder charges on which he had implicated himself, were dropped and he was freed.
He would have been little more than a footnote in the history of the Troubles if it were not for the fact that he is a troubled soul who is driven by some fierce compulsion to examine and tell the truth about himself and his experiences with both the IRA and the RUC.
The product of this almost masochistic introspection is this work, the most convincingly honest book ever written about the IRA.
Life with the IRA for Collins was a sordid round of choosing "targets" discovering their weaknesses then relaying the information to - mostly - unsavoury associates lurking across the Border in Dundalk who, in turn, arranged the murders.
He worked as a customs officer in Newry and happily abused his position in the Imperial Civil Service, which was traditionally more open to Catholics than the Northern Ireland civil service, to glean information on targets.
For two years he spied remorselessly on a colleague who was a part time Ulster Defence Regiment soldier until he worked out a way to have him killed. The UDR man almost never kept a regular schedule because of the threat of assassination by the IRA. However, Collins discovered that he brought tea and sausage rolls to his Catholic and Protestant colleagues at the same time every Friday. Collins "had struck gold". The Dundalk hit squad arrived at the customs office along with the sausage rolls and tea.
Collins was good at this type of work. He watched an RUC man, close to retirement, until he decided that an ideal time to kill was as he returned home to watch a World Cup match. He was shot dead in front of his wife.
Another RUC, man was known to take his handicapped son pony riding in the Mournes near Newry, but he apparently escaped. A man suspected of being in the UDR was targeted as he picked up his elderly father at the same time each week.
Collins considered calling in the hit squad to kill another UDR man whose wife had just given birth in the same maternity ward in Daisy Hill Hospital where his own child was being born. Collins called off the operation only because it was too risky.
He used the Customs computer to check registration numbers of cars he suspected were owned by police and UDR men. When Collins worked with Sinn Fein he discovered the electoral register was a good way to discover the addresses of local security force members. In his recounting of all this he spares almost no detail in the dirty little war he waged on behalf of republicanism.
Collins was one of the Republican movement's elite, chosen to deliver the keynote Easter oration in Crossmaglen, dressed in the traditional balaclava and dark glasses. He crossed swords with Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison, and brought Christy Moore to Newry for a fund raising concert at which he raffled his own Iranian printed Bobby Sands poster.
But, as such things do, it all ended in tears. The 32 county socialist republic did not materialise. He realised, from the outset of Sinn Fein's electoral run against the SDLP, that inevitably one day the armed struggle would be called off.
He was arrested after nine RUC members were killed in a mortar attack on Newry RUC station, broke under interrogation and implicated his old friends, most of whom he had now come to hate.
He talks at length, though unconvincingly, about his grief at the damage he had done to the dead UDR and RUC men's families. He once saw the daughter of the UDR colleague he had murdered on a train, remembering her as a child at her father's funeral which he, of course attended.
He had a mental breakdown separated under IRA threat from his family but eventually regained his self confidence and returned to Newry, where he now lives.
Collins is unique. He patently has no agenda. He has nothing to, gain and hides nothing. He is still, emotionally a republican although he despises the IRA and Sinn Fein, not least for what they do to their own people. Killing Rage is a complicated, disturbing but rewarding read.