Exposing insanities. The Informer. by Sean O'Callaghan. Bantam Press
£16.99

IRA secrecy is being increasingly breached by memoirs from former members. This readable best-seller is easily the most important.
Sean O'Callaghan rose from IRA foot-soldier to leading Sinn Fein strategist, head of the IRA's Southern Command and the Irish police's probably highest-ranking informer. He foiled IRA operations including assassinating Charles and Diana, beach bombs around Britain and the importation of 7 tons of munitions. A Provo bullet may be his reward.
O'Callaghan hails from a republican family in Kerry. As a child, he rebelled against his elders' religious and political "mumbo-jumbo and superstition." He criticises the "bastardized and hate-filled version of Irish history imbibed at home and school."
But at the age of 15 he was propelled, with many others, into the fledgling IRA by the sight of northern Catholics fleeing from rabid bigotry. He soon became "a full-time revolutionary" producing bombs and training others.
He murdered two people. He describes how he pumped eight bullets into a Catholic policeman. He became disillusioned with "the whole squalid murderous nonsense." The crunch came with a future IRA Chief of Staff's sectarian hope that a murdered policewoman had been pregnant as this would be "two for the price of one."
After a spell in London, O'Callaghan rejoined to destroy the IRA from within. He describes "the bizarre existence" of working inside his own head whilst collaborating with "pathetic, ugly figures*.with not a scrap of moral fibre between them."
He provides pen-portraits of the cowardly, careerist and the dedicated. He reveals many new insights: Syrian and Soviet involvement in Lord Mountbatten's murder; how prize race-horse Shergar was kidnapped but died within days; discussing John Hume's murder; using Sinn Fein printing presses to forge rail passes; the IRA's black propaganda unit which discussed killing a prominent Irish politician's son who wanted to join up and then blaming it on the SAS.
O'Callaghan eventually gave himself up and served 8 years. Prison also included hunger and thirst strikes and an attempted poisoning. He falsely confessed to murdering another informer to prompt an inquiry into how the Irish police had bungled his rescue. His wider evidence was deemed unhelpful as secret negotiations had begun between the Provos and the British.
The book's core is its assessment of the IRA's "strategic cunning." He quotes conversations with leading IRA strategists in the 1980s that they realised they were facing defeat. The RUC was besting them, IRA support networks were ineffective, John Hume's constitutional SDLP was making big political gains and isolating Sinn Fein.