A brush with death
If someone had told me before I met Sean O'Callaghan that he had murdered a junior British police woman and a part time female soldier as a fully fledged member of the IRA, it would be hard not to imagine some tattooed bearded gruff old Irish man with anger in his voice who commanded fear from everyone he spoke to. If I then went on to describe another man who helps the Irish government to procure thousands of tonnes of armoury from the IRA for their terror campaigns, who would you think of?
Sean O'Callaghan is one and the same man: reformed, rehabilitated and sombre with a look of trouble, not terror in his eyes. When I met him at the Oxford Union last week, he seemed a little suspicious of me, his tired old face telling a thousand stories of remorse and guilt. His voice had a tone of pleading, almost as if this were his last cry to the world, his last plea to human kind. When Sean walked, it was not hard to notice the hump in his back from years in a prison cell, and more years in hiding; being exiled by the IRA from his home in Ireland had taken its toll, and now it was time to set the balance straight.
"I have a desire to challenge the IRA" He coughs, brushing his grey hair back over his brow, "In the UK at any time there are three thousand families, men, women, children, who were expelled from Ireland by terrorist groups. There shouldn't be a situation in these islands where people have to flee their homes in fear! A lot of people in the IRA want to kill me, and I would most like to stay alive for as long as I can." His muted anger seemed more like a desire for revenge, but it was something much less sinister than just brute emotion. This was a man whose childhood had been stolen from him by terrorism, by hatred and by fear: a man who had no wish to wound or hurt another, but whose driving force was the aspiration for peace; a peace, he argued, which could only be had by ridding the Irish system of its "one last poison and abscess": the terrorists.
"Sinn Fein is an illegitimate party; you can't accept a group like that in government, who think they can exile some and inflict brutal beatings on others. They've murdered people in the last 18 months, maimed and tortured hundreds more. We can't have a minister for health who has connections with a terrorist group. You have to challenge that!"
It seemed almost hard to believe that several years ago Sean O'Callaghan was sitting in a British prison, serving a reduced life sentence for ruthless murder, and was now sat in a room sharing a glass of wine with an Oxford undergraduate chatting about the exigencies of his life. I'd never understood the psychology of murder nor the motivation to do it, and so it appeared to be the perfect opportunity to ask a man whose life had been punctuated by slaughter: why?
"There's not a day goes by without me thinking about those two innocent girls. As the years go on, nothing that I do now will matter unless I can bring them back to life. I don't believe we have the right to kill anybody" he says "but I can certainly understand why some would do so." He looked down, his eyes watering up, and gave a deep sigh. It was as though nothing anyone said, nothing he did could counter the remorse which he let us have a glimpse of. "There was a girl, Eva Marklin, who was killed by a rocket at an army base attack I was involved in. She was a schoolteacher and pregnant. At the time, the guy next to me said, 'We can get two for one now.' It made my spine shiver. Years later I got to meet her husband and we got on really well, deciding to make a video to be shown around all primary schools in Northern Ireland. After episodes like that in your life, you realise that you have a serious obligation to be humble: but time goes on."
There was something which Sean mentioned to me, not merely in passing, but almost as a point of principle in our conversation, which perplexed me greatly. It was just one sentence, a mere handful of words, but a sentence whose words were loaded with contradiction. "I am agnostic as to whether we have a British ruled Northern Ireland, or an Irish ruled one." From a man who had fought, dedicated, maybe even wasted years of his life fighting the British state in order to gain the one goal which he was now casually negating, contradiction seemed too feeble a word to use. Sean seemed more interesting by the second and yet it wasn't indifference which tarred his ideas, but a fiery commitment to his new beliefs which motivated his re-evaluation. There was, however, one niggling detail which made me feel a little uncomfortable with his metamorphosis. Why had this man who had joined the IRA at 15, spent years in prison for them, and was now under threat of death when he didn't care about the issues for which he fought?
"My father was in the IRA. In the Republican area where I used to live, nobody thought it was a sin to join. I was interested in Cuba, I wanted to change the world and the provisional IRA was a popular front for all of these causes. We thought the proddies were dupes, we thought they were being conned by the British government and eventually they'd realise that we were right and they were wrong. It's difficult to understand the evil which they have done, but put it this way, I don't think the IRA has done anyone any favours. The reasons why I've changed my views are two fold. One: because there's a legitimate Irish government now, a government who I work for and two: because there are over 1 million Protestants who live in Northern Ireland who want to be part of the British state."
Reason doesn't always pervade anger and so I challenged Sean further, accusing him, as some might, of being a sell out.
"If at the end of the day I can stop just one person being killed, just one gun from getting into the hands of terrorists and saving one kid's life, I will do anything in my power." My prejudices had all been shattered. This was a changed man.
Sean O'Callaghan now heads a British based anti-terrorism group TerrorWatch helping to prevent terrorism in Northern Ireland
13th Feb 2003