The meaning of Sean O’Callaghan

Sean O’Callaghan, one of the most important defectors from the Provisional IRA , successfully evaded the republican movement in death as in life – by dying yesterday of natural causes.

Much will written in the obituaries tomorrow about the amazing details of O’Callaghan’s journey  – from the precocious, murderous,  republican  ‘boy soldier’ of the 1970s to the double agent extraordinaire who saved the life of the Prince and Princess of Wales from an IRA bomb which was due to be planted in a lavatory next to the Royal Box at the Dominion Theatre in 1983.

What, though, was the wider significance of his career? The title of his autobiography is The Informer – and he was an informer in every sense of the word: first, for his handlers in the Garda Siochana and in MI5; but, subsequently, also in the wider sense – by informing key decision makers in the United Kingdom (such as Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell and the Ulster Unionist Leader David Trimble) about the nature of the republican movement after his release from prison in 1996.