Early Life
It was in Camlough, a small town in south Armagh, that Eamon Collins grew up. After finishing school, he worked for a time in the civil service in London before he started studying law at Queen's University. On Easter, 1974, as Eamon Collins walked home to his parents' home in south Armagh, he saw his father being beaten by a gang of British soldiers. He was badly beaten when he tried to stop them, and they were both detained.
However, he was contemptuous of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s, seeing them as representing a simplistic Irish nationalist, militarist programme. Collins himself was attracted to Marxist politics.
He never completed his degree. After working in a pub for a period, he joined the Customs Service of Northern Ireland. Around this time, Collins also got married. He and his wife were later to have four children together. At the same time he was also preparing to become a republican paramilitary.
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