Maurice O’Neill, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) Captain captured in 1942 after a shootout with Irish police (Garda Síochána), is executed on November 12, 1942, one of only two people executed in independent Ireland for a non-murder offence.
O’Neill is a farmer from an Irish republican family in the farming community of Cahersiveen, County Kerry. He and his older brother Sean are dedicated Irish republicans. He fights in the Irish Republican Army’s 1942-44 Northern Campaign and is assigned to the IRA’s General Headquarters (GHQ) at the time of his capture. In the early 1930s, his brother Sean serves in the IRAs Dublin Brigade and serves on GHQ Staff IRA in various capacities from 1945 to 1955.
On October 24, 1942, O’Neill is arrested after a raid by Garda Síochána in which Garda Detective Officer Mordant is shot and killed in Donnycarney, Dublin. The mission of the police raid is the capture of Harry White, the IRA Quartermaster General. White escapes capture and O’Neill is arrested but not charged with the murder of the Detective Officer but with “shooting with intent.” It is thought that Detective Officer Mordant’s death may have been a result of crossfire between Special Branch policemen.
The 25-year-old O’Neill’s execution provokes particularly widespread protests, as he is a popular figure in his native County Kerry. He apparently is stoic and calm when his fate becomes clear. In a letter to his elder brother, Sean, from Arbour Hill Prison, he writes: “I suppose you saw in the papers where I met my Waterloo last Saturday night. Well, such are the fortunes of war…there is only one sentence, death or release. So I believe it is the full penalty for me. There is no good in having false hopes, hard facts must be faced.” In his last letter to his father he writes: “I am glad that I am not being reprieved as the thought of the torture I would have to endure in Portlaoise makes me shudder.”
Many Irish republican prisoners are released in 1948 as is the body of O’Neill (on September 17, 1948). O’Neill is buried in the republican plot at Kilavarnogue Cemetery, Cahersiveen, County Kerry. His name is listed on a monument in Fairview Park, Dublin, with the names other IRA members of that period who lose their lives. The Maurice O’Neill Bridge to Valentia Island is built in 1970 and named in memory of the young farmer who had been executed in 1942. In Kilflynn, County Kerry, the Crotta O’Neill’shurling club is named after him. In 2011, an Irish television documentary focuses on how O’Neill’s execution affected his family.
Ward, 25, from Stockport in Cheshire, receives a life term for each of those who died when the coach exploded on the M62 motorway. The sentences are to run concurrently with three other sentences of up to twenty years for causing explosions. She remains impassive as Justice Waller passes sentence.
During the trial the court hears that Ward had joined the army – from which she later deserts – on the instructions of the republican group, the IRA. Her detailed knowledge of bases helps to facilitate the coach bombing, prosecution barrister John Cobb QC alleges. She also gives information to the IRA which leads to two attacks on army targets in which six people die, Cobb adds.
Ward initially confesses her crimes in a statement to police which she later retracts. She denies being a member of the IRA but photographs of her in the outlawed organisation’s uniform are shown to the jury at Wakefield Crown Court.
It also emerges in court that Ward was arrested after the bombing of Euston railway station in September 1973 but is later released. Questions are raised as to why the police let her go even though traces of explosives were found on her hands.
As Ward is led from the courtroom to the cells, the only member of her family present, sister-in-law Jean Ward, sobs. Her father, Thomas, says earlier he does not believe his daughter is capable of such “brutal and callous acts.” Her brother, Tommy, says none of the family think Judith has ever been in the IRA. “We don’t think she was so heavily involved. There has been a lot of romancing,” he says.
That is a point echoed in court by Ward’s solicitor, Andrew Rankin QC, who highlights many improbabilities in her confessions. They include having been married to an IRA man and having borne a child by another.
Ward spends 18 years in jail before her conviction is quashed in 1992. Her lawyers argue that the trial jury should have been told of her history of mental illness.
Three Appeal Court judges conclude that Ward’s conviction had been “secured by ambush.” They say government forensic scientists had withheld information that could have changed the course of her trial. Her case is one of a spate of miscarriage of justices revealed in the early 1990s.
After her release, Ward writes an autobiography, Ambushed, published in 1992. She subsequently starts a course in criminology and becomes a campaigner for prisoners’ rights.
(From: “On This Day – 4 November,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk)
Brennan is born in Dublin on January 6, 1917, one of four siblings, and grows up at 48 Cherryfield Avenue in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh. She and her sisters are each named after ancient Irish Queens: Emer, Deirdre and Maeve. Her parents, Robert and Úna Brennan, both from County Wexford, are republicans and are deeply involved in the Irish political and cultural struggles of the early twentieth century. They participate in the 1916 Easter Rising but while Úna is imprisoned for a few days, Robert is sentenced to death. The sentence is commuted to penal servitude.
Robert’s continuing political activity results in further imprisonments in 1917 and 1920. Brennan is born while he was in prison. He is director of publicity for the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War. He also founds and is the director of The Irish Press newspaper. His imprisonments and activities greatly fragment her childhood. In her story The Day We Got Our Own Back she recounts her memory of how, when she was five, her home was raided by Irish Free State forces looking for her father, who was on the run.
Robert Brennan is appointed the Irish Free State’s first minister to the United States, and the family moves to Washington, D.C. in 1934, when Brennan is seventeen. She attends the Sisters of ProvidenceCatholic school in Washington, Immaculata Seminary, graduating in 1936. She then graduates with a degree in English from American University in 1938. She and her two sisters remain in the United States when her parents and brother return to Ireland in 1944.
Brennan moves to New York City and finds work as a fashion copywriter at Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s. She also writes a Manhattan column for the Dublin society magazine Social and Personal, and writes several short pieces for The New Yorker magazine. In 1949, she is offered a staff job by William Shawn, The New Yorker‘s managing editor.
Brennan first writes for The New Yorker as a social diarist. She writ’s sketches about New York life in The Talk of the Town section under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady.” She also contributes fiction criticism, fashion notes, and essays. She writes about both Ireland and the United States.
The New Yorker begins publishing Brennan’s short stories in 1950. The first of these stories is called The Holy Terror. In it, Mary Ramsay, a “garrulous, greedy heap of a woman” tries to keep her job as a ladies’ room attendant in a Dublin hotel.
Brennan’s work is fostered by William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., and she writes under The New Yorker managing editors Harold Ross and William Shawn. Although she is widely read in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, she is almost unknown in Ireland, even though Dublin is the setting of many of her short stories.
A compendium of Brennan’s New Yorker articles called The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker is published in 1969. Two collections of short stories, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974) are also published.
Brennan’s career does not really take off until after her death which leads many of her stories to be reintroduced to the public and many articles written about her up until her passing.
The love of Brennan’s life is reportedly writer and theatre critic/director Walter Kerr but he breaks off their engagement and marries writer Bridget Jean Collins.
In 1954, Brennan marries St. Clair McKelway, The New Yorker‘s managing editor. McKelway has a history of alcoholism, womanizing and manic depression and has already been divorced four times. She and McKelway divorce after five years.
Brennan is writing consistently and productively in the late 1960s. By the time her first books are published, however, she is showing signs of mental illness. Her previously immaculate appearance becomes unkempt. Her friends begin to find her eccentricities disturbing rather than entertaining. She becomes obsessive.
In the 1970s, Brennan becomes paranoid and alcoholic. Hospitalized on numerous occasions, she becomes destitute and homeless, frequently sleeping in the women’s lavatory at The New Yorker. She is last seen at the magazine’s offices in 1981.
In the 1980s, Brennan vanishes from view and her work is forgotten. After wandering from one transient hotel to another along 42nd Street, she is admitted to Lawrence Nursing Home in Arverne.
Brennan dies of a heart attack on November 1, 1993, aged 76, and is buried in Queens, New York City.
Johnny Adair, leader of “C Company” of the Ulster Loyalistparamilitary organisation Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), a cover name of the Ulster Defence Association, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on October 27, 1963. He is known as Mad Dog. He is expelled from the organisation in 2002 following a violent power struggle. Since 2003, he, his family and a number of supporters have been forced to leave Northern Ireland by other loyalists.
Adair is born into a working class loyalist background and raised in Belfast. He grows up in the Lower Oldpark area, a site of many sectarian clashes during “The Troubles.” By all accounts, he has little parental supervision, and does not attend school regularly. He takes to the streets, forming a skinheadstreet gang with a group of young loyalist friends, who “got involved initially in petty, then increasingly violent crime.” Eventually, he starts a rock band called Offensive Weapon, which during performances espouses support for the British National Front.
While still in his teens, Adair joins the Ulster Young Militants (UYM), and later the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary organisation which also calls itself the Ulster Freedom Fighters.
By the early 1990s, Adair has established himself as head of the UDA/UFF’s “C Company” based on the Shankill Road. When he is charged with terrorist offences in 1995, he admits that he had been a UDA commander for three years up to 1994. During this time, he and his colleagues are involved in multiple and random murders of Catholic civilians. At his trial in 1995, the prosecuting lawyer says he is dedicated to his cause against those whom he “regarded as militant republicans – among whom he had lumped almost the entire Roman Catholic population.” Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detectives believe his unit killed up to 40 people during this period.
Adair once remarks to a Catholic journalist from the Republic of Ireland upon the discovery of her being Catholic, that normally Catholics travel in the boot of his car. According to a press report in 2003, he is handed details of republican suspects by British Army intelligence, and is even invited for dinner in the early 1990s. In his autobiography, he claims he was frequently passed information by sympathetic British Army members, while his own whereabouts were passed to republican paramilitaries by the RUC Special Branch, who, he claims, hated him.
The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of a fish shop on the Shankill Road in October 1993 is an attempt to assassinate Adair and the rest of the UDA’s Belfast leadership in reprisal for attacks on Catholics. The IRA claims that the office above the shop is regularly used by the UDA for meetings and one is due to take place shortly after the bomb is set to explode. The bomb goes off early, killing one IRA man, Thomas Begley, and nine Protestant civilians. The UFF retaliates with a random attack on the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, County Londonderry, which kills eight civilians, two of whom are Protestants. Adair survives 13 assassination attempts, most of which are carried out by the IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).
During this time, undercover officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary record months of discussions with Adair, in which he boasts of his activities, producing enough evidence to charge him with directing terrorism. He is convicted and sentenced to 16 years in HM Prison Maze. In prison, according to some reports, he sells drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy tablets and amphetamines to other loyalist prisoners, earning him an income of £5000 a week.
In January 1998, Adair is one of five loyalist prisoners visited in the prison by British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam. She persuades them to drop their objection to their political representatives continuing the talks that leads to the Good Friday Agreement in April. In 1999, he is released early as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners after the Agreement.
Following his release, much of Adair’s activities are bound up with violent internecine feuds within the UDA and between the UDA and other loyalist paramilitary groupings. The motivation for such violence is sometimes difficult to piece together. It involves a combination of political differences over the loyalist ceasefires, rivalry between loyalists over control of territory and competition over the proceeds of organised crime.
In 1999, shortly after his release from prison, Adair is shot at and grazed in the head by a bullet at a UB40 concert in Belfast. He blames the shooting on republicans, but it is thought that rival loyalists are to blame.
In August 2000, Adair is again mildly injured by a pipe bomb he is transporting in a car. He again attempts to blame the incident on an attack by republicans, but this claim is widely discounted. A feud breaks out at the time between the UDA and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) leaving several loyalists dead. As a result of Adair’s involvement in the violence, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson, revokes his early release and returns him to prison.
In May 2002, Adair is released from prison again. Once free, he is a key part of an effort to forge stronger ties between the UDA/UFF and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), a small breakaway faction of the UVF loyalist paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland. The most open declaration of this is a joint mural depicting Adair’s UDA “C company” and the LVF. Other elements in the UDA/UFF strongly resist these movements, which they see as an attempt by Adair to win external support in a bid to take over the leadership of the UDA. Some UDA members dislike his overt association with the drugs trade, with which the LVF are even more heavily involved. A loyalist feud begins, and ends with several men dead and scores evicted from their homes.
On September 25, 2002, Adair is expelled from the UDA/UFF along with close associate John White, and the organisation almost splits as Adair tries to woo influential leaders such as Andre Shoukri, who are initially sympathetic to him. There are attempts on Adair’s and White’s lives.
Adair returns to prison in January 2003, when his early release licence is revoked by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Paul Murphy, on grounds of engaging in unlawful activity. On February 1, 2003, UDA divisional leader John Gregg is shot dead along with another UDA member, Rab Carson, on returning from a Rangers F.C. match in Glasgow. The killing is widely blamed on Adair’s C Company as Gregg is one of those who organised his expulsion from the UDA. Five days later, on February 6, about twenty Adair supporters, including White, flee their homes for Scotland, widely seen as a response to severe intimidation.
Adair is released from prison again on January 10, 2005. He immediately leaves Northern Ireland and joins his family in Bolton, Lancashire, where it is claimed he stays with supporters of Combat 18 and the Racial Volunteer Force.
The police in Bolton question Adair’s wife, Gina, about her involvement in the drugs trade, and his son, nicknamed both “Mad Pup” and “Daft Dog,” is charged with selling crack cocaine and heroin. Adair is arrested and fined for assault and threatening behaviour in September 2005. He had married Gina Crossan, his partner for many years and the mother of his four children, at HM Prison Maze on February 21, 1997. She is three years Adair’s junior and grew up in the same Lower Oldpark neighbourhood.
After being released, Adair is almost immediately arrested again for violently assaulting Gina, who suffers from ovarian cancer. Since this episode he reportedly moves to Scotland, living in Troon in Ayrshire.
In May 2006, Adair reportedly receives £100,000 from John Blake publishers for a ghost-written autobiography.
In November 2006, the UK’s Five television channel transmits an observational documentary on Adair made by Dare Films.
Adair appears in a documentary made by Donal MacIntyre and screened in 2007. The focus of the film centers around Adair and another supposedly reformed character, a Neo-Nazi from Germany called Nick Greger, and their trip to Uganda to build an orphanage. Adair is seen to fire rifles, stating it is the first time he has done so without wearing gloves. He also admits to being “worried sick” and “pure sick with worry” after Greger disappears in Uganda for days on end. It turns out that he had gone off and married a Ugandan lady. Adair confesses via telephone that he “thought something might have happened to Nick.”
On July 20, 2015, three Irish republicans, Antoin Duffy, Martin Hughes and Paul Sands, are found guilty of planning to murder Adair and Sam McCrory. Charges against one of the accused in the trial are dropped on July 1.
On September 10, 2016, Adair’s son, Jonathan Jr., is found dead in Troon, aged 32. He dies from an accidental overdose while celebrating the day after his release from prison for motoring offences. He had been in and out of prison since the family fled Northern Ireland. He served a five-year sentence for dealing heroin and crack cocaine. The year before, he had been cleared of a gun raid at a party and in 2012 is the target of a failed bomb plot. He was also facing trial later that year on drugs charges.
In December 2023, while recording a podcast with far-right activist Tommy Robinson, Adair surprisingly expresses a grudging respect for the IRA hunger strikers, describing the manner of their deaths as “dedication at the highest level” for a political cause and admitting that he would not have volunteered to do the same if asked.
Clery is the son of Arthur Clery (who also uses the names Arthur Patrick O’Clery and Arthur Ua Cléirigh), a barrister, and Catherine Moylan. His father, who practises in India, publishes books on early Irish history.
Clery’s principal themes include the difficulties of Roman Catholic graduates seeking professional employment, dramatic criticism (he hails Lady Gregory‘s play Kincora as the Abbey Theatre‘s first masterpiece but is repulsed by the works of John Millington Synge), Catholic-Protestant rivalry, tension within the Dublin professional class, and the vagaries of the Gaelic revival movement.
Clery advocates partition on the basis of a two nations theory, first advanced in 1904–1905, possibly in response to William O’Brien‘s advocacy of securing Home Rule through compromise with moderate Unionists. Several of his articles on the subject are reprinted in his 1907 essay collection, The Idea of a Nation.
Clery derives this unusual view for a nationalist from several motives, including a belief that arguments for Irish nationalists’ right to self-determination can be used to justify Ulster Unionists’ right to secede from Ireland, fear that it might be impossible to obtain Home Rule unless Ulster is excluded, and distaste for both Ulster Protestants and Ulster Catholics, whom he sees as deplorably anglicised. He remains a partitionist for the rest of his life. He is not particularly successful as a barrister, but on the establishment of University College Dublin (UCD) in 1909, he is appointed to the part-time post of Professor of the Law of Property.
Clery does not take his seat and does not contest the September 1927 Irish general election since new legislation obliges candidates to pledge in advance that they will take their seat. He is one of the lawyers who advises Éamon de Valera that the Irish Free State is not legally obliged to pay the Land Annuities which had been agreed in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922.
Clery was a close friend of Tom Kettle, with whom he founds a dining club, the “Cui Bono.” Hugh Kennedy is also a lifelong friend. As Auditor of the L & H, he tries to prevent James Joyce from reading a paper praising Henrik Ibsen, asserting that “the effect of Henrik Ibsen is evil,” but Joyce succeeds in reading it after he argues his case with the college president. The principal influence on Clery is the Irish Ireland editor D. P. Moran, to whose weekly paper, The Leader, Clery becomes a frequent contributor. In addition to The Idea of a Nation, he publishes Dublin Essays (1920) and (as Arthur Synan) The coming of the king.
O’Shannon is awarded lifetime membership of the Irish Film & Television Academy in 2010, to which he says it is “particularly gratifying that it occurs before I pop my clogs”.
The Irish radio and television broadcaster Terry Wogan describes O’Shannon as possibly the greatest Irish television journalist of the 20th century.
O’Shannon first becomes a journalist with The Irish Times on leaving the Royal Air Force in 1947. Later he joins the Irish state broadcasting service Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ).
In July 1972, O’Shannon records a notable television interview with 31-year-old Muhammad Ali, when Ali is in Dublin to compete at Croke Park in a bout with Alvin Lewis.
O’Shannon receives a Jacob’s Award for his 1976 TV documentary, Even the Olives are Bleeding, which details with the activities of the “Connolly Column” in the Spanish Civil War. Two years later he is honoured with a second Jacob’s Award for his television biography Emmet Dalton Remembers (1978).
In 1978, O’Shannon leaves RTÉ to join Canadian company Alcan which is setting up an aluminum plant at Aughinish, County Limerick, in 1978. He is head-hunted to become its Director of Public Affairs, an important post at a time when there are environmental concerns about the effects of aluminum production. He admits that he is attracted by the salary, “five times what RTÉ were paying me,” but he also later says that one reason for the move is that he had become unhappy with working at RTÉ, stating in an interview that: “The real reason I got out of RTÉ was that they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do journalistically.” He had submitted proposals to the station’s editors for television documentary series on the Irish Civil War, and also one on the wartime Emergency period, but they had been rejected. While he enjoys the social life with lavish expenses which his public relations duties involve, his friends believe that he misses the varied life and travel of journalism. He retires early from Aughinish in 1992, and returns to making television documentaries with RTÉ.
O’Shannon’s wife, Patsy, whom he met while they were working at The Irish Times office in London, dies in 2006. They had been married for more than 50 years.
On January 12, 2007, O’Shannon announces his retirement at the age of 80. In a 2008 television documentary, he admits that throughout his marriage he had been a serial womaniser and had repeatedly engaged in extra-marital affairs unbeknownst to his wife.
After weakening health for two years, and spending his last days in a hospice at Blackrock, O’Shannon dies at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin on October 22, 2011, in his 84th year. His body is reposed at Fanagans Funeral Home in Dublin on October 25, followed by a funeral the following day at Glasnevin Cemetery Chapel, where his remains are cremated afterward.
Director General of RTÉNoel Curran says O’Shannon had brought into being “some of the great moments in the RTÉ documentary and factual schedule over the past five decades.” In tribute, RTÉ One shows the documentary Cathal O’Shannon: Telling Tales on November 10, 2011. It had originally aired in 2008 to mark his 80th birthday
In the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, de Valera commands an occupied building and is the last commander to surrender. Because of his American birth, he escapes execution by the British but is sentenced to penal servitude. Released in 1917 but arrested again and deported in May 1918 to England, where he is imprisoned, he is acclaimed by the Irish as the chief survivor of the uprising and in October 1917 is elected president of the Irish republican and democratic socialistSinn Féin political party, which wins three-fourths of all the Irish constituencies in December 1918.
After Dáil Éireann ratifies the treaty by a small majority in 1922, de Valera supports the republican resistance in the ensuing Irish Civil War. W. T. Cosgrave’s Irish Free State ministry imprisons him, but he is released in 1924 and then organizes a republican opposition party that does not sit in Dáil Éireann. In 1927, however, he persuades his followers to sign the oath of allegiance as “an empty political formula,” and his new Fianna Fáil (“Soldiers of Destiny”) party then enters the Dáil, demanding abolition of the oath of allegiance, of the governor-general, of the Seanad Éireann (senate) as then constituted, and of land-purchase annuities payable to Great Britain. The Cosgrave ministry is defeated by Fianna Fáil in 1932, and de Valera, as head of the new ministry, embarks quickly on severing connections with Great Britain. He withholds payment of the land annuities, and an “economic war” results. Increasing retaliation by both sides enables de Valera to develop his program of austere national self-sufficiency in an Irish-speaking Ireland while building up industries behind protective tariffs. In the new Constitution of Ireland, ratified by referendum in 1937, the Irish Free State becomes Ireland, a sovereign, independent democracy tenuously linked with the British Commonwealth (under the Executive Authority (External Relations) Act 1936) only for purposes of diplomatic representation.
De Valera’s prestige is enhanced by his success as president of the council of the League of Nations in 1932 and of its assembly in 1938. He also enters negotiations with British Prime MinisterNeville Chamberlain in which he guarantees that he will never allow Ireland to be used as a base for attacking Britain in the event of war. This culminates in the Anglo-Irish defense agreement of April 1938, whereby Britain relinquishes the naval bases of Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly (retained in a defense annex to the 1921 treaty), and in complementary finance and trade treaties that end the economic war. This makes possible de Valera’s proclamation in September 1939, upon the outbreak of World War II, that Ireland will remain neutral and will resist attack from any quarter. In secret, however, de Valera also authorizes significant military and intelligence assistance to both the British and the Americans throughout the war. He realizes that a German victory will imperil Ireland’s independence, of which neutrality is the ultimate expression. By avoiding the burdens and destruction of the war, de Valera achieves a relative prosperity for Ireland in comparison with the war-torn countries of Europe, and he retains office in subsequent elections.
In 1948, a reaction against the long monopoly of power and patronage held by de Valera’s party enables the opposition, with the help of smaller parties, to form an interparty government under John A. Costello. Ironically, this precarious coalition collapses within three years after Ireland becomes a republic by means of the repeal of the Executive Authority (External Relations) Act 1936 and the severance of all ties with the British Commonwealth, an act de Valera had avoided. De Valera resumes office until 1954, when he appeals unsuccessfully for a fresh mandate, and Costello forms his second interparty ministry. No clearly defined difference now exists between the opposing parties in face of rising prices, continued emigration, and a backward agriculture. De Valera claims, however, that a strong single-party government is indispensable and that all coalitions must be weak and insecure. On this plea he obtains, in March 1957, the overall majority that he demands.
In 1959, de Valera agrees to stand as a candidate for the presidency. He resigns his position as Taoiseach and leader of the Fianna Fáil party. In June he is elected president, and is reelected in 1966. He retires to a nursing home near Dublin in 1973 and dies there on August 29, 1975.
De Valera’s career spans the dramatic period of Ireland’s modern cultural and national revolution. As an anticolonial leader, a skillful constitutionalist, and a symbol of national liberation, he dominates Ireland in the half century following the country’s independence.
(From: “Éamon de Valera, president of Ireland,” Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com, last updated August 14, 2025)
O’Callaghan is born into a family with a Fenianparamilitary history. His paternal grandfather had taken the Anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War, and his father had been interned by the Irish Government at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare for IRA activity during World War II.
By the late 1960s, O’Callaghan ceases to practise his Catholic faith, adopts atheism and has become interested in the theories of Marxist revolutionary politics, which finds an outlet of practical expression in the sectarian social unrest in Northern Ireland at the time, centered on the activities of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In 1969, communal violence breaks out in Northern Ireland and believing that British imperialism is responsible, he joins the newly founded Provisional IRA at the age of 17.
Soon afterward, O’Callaghan is arrested by local Gardaí after he accidentally detonates a small amount of explosives, which cause damage to the homes of his parents and their neighbours. After demanding, and receiving, treatment as a political prisoner, he quietly serves his sentence.
After becoming a full-time paramilitary with the IRA, in the early to mid-1970s O’Callaghan takes part in over seventy operations associated with Irish Republican political violence including bomb materials manufacture, attacks on IRA targets in Northern Ireland, and robberies to provide funding for the organisation.
In 1976, O’Callaghan ends his involvement with the IRA after becoming disillusioned with its activities. He later recalls that his disenchantment with the IRA began when one of his compatriots openly hoped that a female police officer who had been blown up by an IRA bomb had been pregnant so they could get “two for the price of one.” He is also concerned with what he perceives as an undercurrent of ethnic hatred in its rank and file toward the Ulster Scots population. He leaves Ireland and moves to London. In May 1978, he marries a Scottish woman of Protestantunionist descent. During the late 1970s, he runs a successful mobile cleaning business. However, he is unable to fully settle into his new life, later recalling, “In truth there seemed to be no escaping from Ireland. At the strangest of times I would find myself reliving the events of my years in the IRA. As the years went on, I came to believe that the Provisional IRA was the greatest enemy of democracy and decency in Ireland.”
In 1979, O’Callaghan is approached by the IRA seeking to recruit him again for its paramilitary campaign. In response, he decides to turncoat against the organisation and becomes an agent within its ranks for the Irish Government. He decides to become a double agent even though he knows that even those who hate the IRA as much as he now does have a low opinion of informers. However, he feels it is the only way to stop the IRA from luring teenagers into their ranks and training them to kill.
Soon after being approached by the IRA to re-join, O’Callaghan returns to Tralee from London, where he arranges a clandestine meeting with an officer of the Garda Special Detective Unit in a local cemetery, at which he expresses his willingness to work with it to subvert the IRA from within. At this point, he is still opposed to working with the British Government. A few weeks later, he makes contact with Kerry IRA leader Martin Ferris and attends his first IRA meeting since 1975. Immediately afterward, he telephones his Garda contact and says, “We’re in”.
During the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison, O’Callaghan attempts to start his own hunger strike in support of the Maze prisoners but is told to desist by the IRA for fear it will detract focus from the prisoners. He successfully sabotages the efforts of republicans in Kerry from staging hunger strikes of their own.
In 1984, O’Callaghan notifies the Garda of an attempt to smuggle seven tons of AK-47assault rifles from the United States to Ireland aboard a fishing trawler named Valhalla. The guns are intended for the arsenal of the Provisional IRA’s units. As a result of his warning, a combined force of the Irish Navy and Gardaí intercept the boat that received the weaponry, and the guns are seized. The seizure marks the complete end of any major attempt by the IRA to smuggle guns out of the United States.
In 1983, O’Callaghan claims to be tasked by the IRA with placing 25 lbs. of Frangex in the Dominion Theatre in London, in an attempt to kill Prince Charles and Princess Diana who are due to attend a charity pop music concert there. A warning is phoned into the Garda, and the Royal couple are hurriedly ushered from the theatre by their police bodyguard during the concert. The theatre had been searched before the concert and a second search following the warning reveals no device.
In 1985, O’Callaghan is elected as a Sinn Féin councillor for Tralee Urban District Council, and unsuccessfully contests a seat on Kerry County Council.
After becoming disillusioned with his work with the Irish Government following the murder of another of its agents within the IRA, which it had failed to prevent despite O’Callaghan’s warnings of the threat to him, and sensing a growing threat to himself from the organisation which had become suspicious of his own behaviour, he withdraws from the IRA and leaves Ireland to live in England, taking his wife and children with him. His marriage ends in a divorce in 1987, and on November 29, 1988, he walks into a police station in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, where he presents himself to the officer on duty at the desk, confesses to the murder of Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) Greenfinch (female member) Eva Martin and the murder of D.I. Peter Flanagan during the mid-1970s, and voluntarily surrenders to British prosecution.
Although the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) offers him witness protection as part of the informer policy, O’Callaghan refuses it and is prosecuted under charges of two murders and 40 other crimes, to all of which he pleads guilty, committed in British jurisdiction with the IRA. Having been found guilty, he is sentenced to a total of 539 years in prison. He serves his sentence in prisons in Northern Ireland and England. While in jail, he publishes his story in The Sunday Times. He is released after being granted the royal prerogative of mercy by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996.
In 1998, O’Callaghan publishes an autobiographical account of his experiences in Irish Republican paramilitarism, entitled The Informer: The True Life Story of One Man’s War on Terrorism (1998).
In 2002, O’Callaghan is admitted to Nightingale Hospital, Marylebone, an addiction and rehab center where he undergoes a rehabilitation program for alcohol dependency. His identity and past activities are not revealed to the other patients. He lives relatively openly in London for the rest of his life, refusing to adopt a new identity. He is befriended in the city by the Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, and works as a security consultant, and also occasional advisor to the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) on how to handle Irish republicanism in general, and Sinn Féin in particular.
In 2006, O’Callaghan appears in a London court with regard to an aggravated robbery that occurs in which he is the victim.
In 2015, O’Callaghan publishes James Connolly: My Search for the Man, the Myth & his Legacy (2015), a book containing a critique of the early 20th century Irish revolutionary James Connolly, and what he considers to be his destructive legacy in Ireland’s contemporary politics.
O’Callaghan dies by drowning after suffering a heart attack at the age of 63 while in a swimming pool in Kingston, Jamaica, on August 23, 2017, while visiting his daughter. A memorial service is held in his memory on March 21, 2018, at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a Church of England parish church at the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, London. The service is attended by representatives from Ulster Unionist parties and the Irish Government.
Against his father’s wishes, Neligan joins the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) – also in 1917. Picking up travel documentation from the local Royal Irish Constabulary barracks, he declines a suggestion that he enlist in this armed rural force. After service as a uniformed constable with the DMP, he is promoted to Detective and transferred into the Department’s widely hated counterintelligence and anti-political-subversion unit, the G Division, in 1919. In May 1920, his elder brother Maurice (1895–1920), an Irish Republican Army (IRA) member and friend of Michael Collins, persuades him to resign from the DMP.
After his resignation, Neligan returns to his native County Limerick with the intention of joining the Limerick IRA. Shortly afterward, Maurice is killed in a motorcycle accident, near their home in Templeglantine. In the meantime, Neligan also receives word from a family friend that Michael Collins wishes to meet with him in Dublin. Collins is outraged that Neligan has been allowed to resign and persuades him to rejoin the DMP as a mole for the intelligence wing of the IRA. Along with Detectives Eamon Broy and James McNamara, Neligan acts as a highly valuable agent for Collins and passes on reams of vital information. He leaks documents about the relative importance of police and military personnel and also warns insurgents of upcoming raids and ambushes. There are unconfirmed rumors that Neligan might be a double agent working for British interests.
In 1921, Collins orders Neligan to let himself be recruited into MI5 and he uses the opportunity to memorise their passwords and the identities of their agents. All of this is passed on to Collins. After Broy and McNamara are dismissed in 1921, Neligan becomes Collins’ most important mole inside Dublin Castle.
In 1924, Neligan hands over his post to the youthful Colonel Michael Joe Costello and takes command of the DMP, which still continues as a force separate from the newly established Garda Síochána, with the rank of Chief Superintendent. The next year he transfers to the Garda when the two police forces are amalgamated, and is instrumental in the foundation of the Garda Special Branch. When Éamon de Valera becomes head of government in 1932, his republican followers demand Neligan’s dismissal. Instead, Neligan is transferred to an equivalent post in the Irish Civil Service. In June 1935, he is married to fellow civil servant Sheila Maeve Rogan. They have one son and three daughters, and reside at 15 St. Helen’s Road, Booterstown, Dublin.
Neligan draws pensions from the DMP, the British MI5, the Garda Síochána and the Irish Civil Service. He also receives an “Old IRA” pension through the Department of Defence.
Newly widowed, Ceannt continues her republican activism, serving as Vice-President of Cumann na mBan and as a member of the Sinn Féin Standing Committee. She also plays a role in the development of the Sinn Féin Courts, a parallel legal system designed to offer an alternative to the British courts.
Ceannt is ardently opposed to the signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. She is imprisoned by the Irish Free State government during the Irish Civil War in Mountjoy Prison for her anti-Treaty activity. Throughout the war, she serves at the highest levels within anti-Treaty Sinn Féin. In the years that follow, she spearheads efforts to secure state compensation for the widows and the children of those who had died in 1916 and in the Irish War of Independence. She serves as the head of the Children’s Fund of the Irish White Cross, an American-funded humanitarian organisation founded to assist victims of unrest in Ireland. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Irish Red Cross.
(Pictured: Photograph, circa 1917, of Áine and Ronan Ceannt, the family of Éamonn Ceannt, who is executed for his participation in the 1916 Easter Rising)
seamus dubhghaill 