Man viewed as one of Irish states’s most important agents said to have drowned while visiting daughter in Jamaica

One of the state’s most important spies inside the IRA who helped thwart a bomb attack that could have killed the Prince and Princess of Wales in the 1980s has died, reportedly in a drowning incident.

Sean 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, 62, died while visiting one of his children in Jamaica this week, it has been confirmed.

His friend Ruth Dudley Edwards, a historian and journalist, said in a Facebook post on Thursday that O’Callaghan had died in a drowning accident.

Dudley Edwards wrote: “It’s beginning to hit the news that Sean O’Callaghan, the IRA killer who became an unpaid spy for the gardaí, has died. He drowned yesterday while swimming in a pool in Jamaica, where he was visiting his daughter. He was a man of exceptional ability and courage and he spent most of his life finding ways of atoning for the crimes he had committed before, at 20, he realised he was fighting in a squalid sectarian war rather than a resistance movement.

“He and I were very close friends for more than 20 years. And, like all his friends, I loved him very much and owe him a great deal for his insights, his wise advice, the depth of his knowledge of politics, history and the human condition.”

In the mid-1970s, O’Callaghan took part in an IRA mortar bomb attack on a military base in County Tyrone during which a female soldier was killed.

Disillusioned by the armed campaign, O’Callaghan volunteered his services at the end of the 1970s to the Garda Síochána. The former taoiseach 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 had regularly read intelligence reports the informer had provided to his garda handlers.

In his autobiography, The Informer, O’Callaghan claimed that in 1984 he was tasked by the IRA with placing 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 also betrayed an IRA arms shipment from the US when the Irish security forces intercepted a fishing trawler called the Valhalla in 1984. The vessel was carrying several tons of weapons destined for the Provisionals.

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

O’Callaghan acted as an unpaid adviser to David Trimble, the future unionist first minister of Northern Ireland, on republicanism and the inner workings of Sinn Féin during the talks leading to the 1998 Good Friday agreement.

He played a key role in a libel case against the Sunday Times brought by Thomas “Slab” Murphy, a tax evader and smuggler who the paper alleged had been the IRA’s chief of staff.

O’Callaghan gave evidence against Murphy in a Dublin court, detailing the latter’s role as one of the directors of the IRA’s armed campaign during the Troubles.



Living in London after he went public about his double life as an informer, O’Callaghan stayed in different addresses and was the target of at least one IRA murder attempt in the city during the early 2000s.

In 2015, he wrote a damning biography of the Irish republican socialist leader James Connolly, who he said had had a massive influence on him joining the IRA at the age of 17.

The informers

The second in command of the Ulster Volunteer Force once remarked about informers who had once betrayed the loyalist movement that: “We have long memories and infinite patience.”

Even after IRA and loyalist paramilitary ceasefires of the mid-1990s, most of those who became state agents realised there was no peace process for them, that their “treachery” would damn them to a life in the shadows. Those who chose to return to the communities they came from paid the price for believing they would be safe.