Former IRA informer O'Callaghan dies suddenly on holiday

By Bob Huggins

O’Callaghan rose through the ranks of the Provisionals from the early 1970s to become its southern commander in the Irish Republic a decade later.

All the time the Kerry-born republican worked as an informer, firstly for the Garda Síochána and later the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s special branch.

O’Callaghan, who was 63 died while visiting one of his children in Jamaica earlier this week.

As well as sabotaging a number of attacks by the IRA in Northern Ireland and England, O’Callaghan worked for David Trimble, the future unionist first minister of Northern Ireland, after his release from prison in the early 1990s .

Disillusioned by the armed campaign, O’Callaghan volunteered his services at the end of the 1970s to the Garda Síochána. The late taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald later revealed that O’Callaghan had been one of the Irish state’s most important agents inside the IRA and that as prime minister he regularly read intelligence reports the informer provided to his Garda handlers.

In his autobiography, The Informer, O’Callaghan claimed that in 1984 he had been tasked by the IRA to place a bomb inside the Dominion Theatre in London, close to a box where Prince Charles and Princess Diana were to sit during a charity rock concert.

He gave a warning to his Garda contacts back in Dublin, who alerted their colleagues in the Metropolitan police in London. The royal couple were rushed out of the theatre by their bodyguards. 

O’Callaghan was jailed in 1988 after he confessed to killing a female soldier and a male colleague in a 1974 mortar bomb attack in county Tyrone. He was freed under a royal prerogative of mercy in 1997.