The informer as hero

The Informer by Sean O'Callaghan Bantam Press 340pp, £16.99 in UK

The Informer by Sean O'Callaghan Bantam Press 340pp, £16.99 in UK

Trouble and suspicion have surrounded Sean O'Callaghan for most of his life. As a teenage bomb maker he blew up the shed at the back of his parent's home in Tralee. He disappeared North with the IRA, then returned home and then disappeared again, this time to England. He reappeared as a senior figure in Sinn Fein and the IRA, then left again for England where he walked into a police station and admitted killing a woman soldier and a policeman; was sentenced to life imprisonment; thrice went on hunger and thirst strike; was poisoned in prison; was released and went on to become the ghost at the celebration table as his former IRA associates were feted internationally during what we call the "peace process".

Whatever your views of him, this book is a clear validation of his claim that he was the most senior member of the Provisional IRA to have turned against it and become, voluntarily, the most important informant in the group's history.

His secret, personal war from the within the IRA - corroborated by gardai and a former Taoiseagh, Garret FitzGerald - is the one of the most extraordinary stories to have emerged from the Troubles.

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The narrative detail in this book supports his claims about his actions and motivations in a way that was not possible in his journalism of the past three years. The Informer is a milestone in writing about the last thirty years of violence on this island.

O'Callaghan simply turned against the IRA because he hated it for what it did to its victims and to those who, like him, had joined as an idealistic young Southerner. He found many of his Northern associates to be detestable, bigoted cynics. He recalls one of the senior Northerners expressing pleasure on hearing a pregnant RUC woman had been killed, and quipping that they had got "two for the price of one".

The Northern Provos' mix of anti-British and anti-Protestant sentiment came as a deep shock to O'Callaghan, who had grown up without sectarianism and was really a bit of a wide-boy. O'Callaghan is a product of modern Ireland, born into a Tralee housing estate and open to influences from pop to Marxism.

Republicanism, like Catholicism, were things of the past to a bright young Sixties teenager like him. But at the outbreak of the Troubles in the North he was attracted to the IRA, as were so many adolescents, out of misplaced revolutionary idealism.

His experiences in the 1970s with the Tyrone IRA disabused him of ever finding romantic revolutionary fulfilment. At the height of his growing sense of misgiving, he had to walk into a public house in Omagh and go up to a middle-aged Catholic RUC man and shoot him to death over his pint. Fleeing from the scene with another young gunman, a low-life sent down from Belfast for the job, he remembers as the point at which he had to get out.

He found the local tradition of IRA men being blessed with holy water by priests before going out on murderous missions a tad disturbing.

He left, went to England and set up a business and family but was drawn back by what he says was a desire to infiltrate the IRA at the highest levels and to try and destroy it.

Whether or not there was British Intelligence involvement in his decision to go back to the IRA will probably remain the biggest unanswered question about the story of his life. But information from other sources and descriptions he gives in the book about his later dealings with the British intelligence service suggests the Brits had absolutely no idea who he was or of his potential value to them. The British "intelligence" services are not all they are sometimes cracked up to be. They completely failed to penetrate the IRA leadership and it is quite possible they just had no idea how high up in the IRA O'Callaghan was.

As a read, the book rips along, and there is a stamp of truth to his recounting of the core point at which he decided to turn against the organisation. He contacted a Special Branch man in Kerry he believed to be an honourable man, and he set in train the arrangements for supplying information to the Garda at a level never before encountered. He worked for the gardai free of charge.

If for nothing else, this book is a gold mine of information about the eerie personalities who ran the IRA.

O'Callaghan is an unprepossessing figure - the sleeve depicts a worn-out man glancing over his shoulder - but he is highly intelligent and, despite what has happened, he comes across as very sane. Informers are not normally a likeable bunch, but O'Callaghan manages the remarkable feat of presenting us with a portrait of the tout as hero.

Jim Cusack is the Irish Times Security Correspondent