As the sunlight streamed through the great, warped window of St Martin-in-the-Fields onto the congregation below, it might have been a memorial service for any public figure.
Politicians filing into the pews included DUP leader Arlene Foster, former first minister David Trimble and Britain’s security minister Ben Wallace.
But it soon became clear that this service to remember Sean O'Callaghan, the IRA killer turned informer who died last year, would be, like the man himself, full of contradictions. The choral ensemble began to sing the air of The Foggy Dew but the words were those of The Soldiers of Twenty Two, one of O'Callaghan's favourite rebel songs.
“When they heard the call of a cause laid low
They sprang to their guns again,
And the pride of all was the first to fall,
The Glory of our fighting men.”
This was, perhaps, the most unlikely gathering to listen to the praises of Cathal Brugha being sung, with groups of burly men with moustaches wearing regimental ties alongside former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, Conservative Northern Ireland guru Jonathan Caine, historians Paul Bew and Liam Kennedy, and Gerald Angley, political counsellor at the Irish embassy in London.
But as the journalist Douglas Murray noted in his gently moving opening address, the memorial service was unusual in another respect.
“Sean was a compartmentalist, keeping his many friends and family in different boxes, a habit born perhaps out of past necessity. Many people here today will have been unaware of each other’s existence,” he said.
And alongside the dignitaries and the men with military bearing sat a diverse group of O’Callaghan’s friends, including some he met through Alcoholics Anonymous and others he helped through various charities.
Paramilitary operations
Born in Tralee in 1954, O’Callaghan joined the IRA while still in his teens and took part in paramilitary operations in Northern Ireland. In 1974, he was involved in an attack on an Ulster Defence Regiment base in Co Tyrone which killed a 28-year-old female soldier, Eva Martin. During the same year, O’Callaghan murdered Peter Flanagan, the head of the RUC special branch in Omagh.
By his own account, O’Callaghan started passing information to the Garda special branch in 1979 but he was regarded later as a British intelligence asset.
His brother Donie read Patrick Kavanagh’s “Epic”, O’Callaghan’s favourite poem, along with a message from his sister Mary.
“It is true to say that Sean didn’t always make it easy for us to love him unconditionally. But we always have. And we always will,” she said.
Rob Bryan, a former police detective, spoke about O’Callaghan as “my friend and fellow spy”, and former Conservative politician Robert Salisbury praised the “moral courage” which led him to inform on his IRA comrades.
Historian and journalist Ruth Dudley Edwards, one of O’Callaghan’s closest friends, described him as a fanatic.
“He would want me to point out that he was no saint but I’ll add that I believe he was a truly good man.”
