Eamon Collins - IRA Career

IRA Career

He joined the IRA at the height of the blanket protest by H-block prisoners in the late 1970s, who wanted Special Category Status for republican prisoners. Collins became involved in street demonstrations at the time and was impressed by the left-wing politics of the new generation of republican leadership that had emerged in the late 1970s.

Collins joined the South Down Brigade of the IRA, based around Newry. This was not one of the organisation's most active units, but it sometimes worked with the South Armagh Brigade, which was the most effective of the IRA's command areas. Collins says in his book Killing Rage that he never felt able to kill anyone himself, but instead became the South Down Brigade's "intelligence officer".

This involved gathering intelligence on intended assassination and bombing targets. His planning was directly responsible for at least five killings, including that of Ulster Defence Regiment Major Ivan Toombs. Many of the bombing targets of Collins' unit were of limited significance. For example, they destroyed the public library in Newry and a pub where a police choir drank after practice.

Collins became noted for his hard-line views on the continuance of armed struggle within the IRA and later becoming part of the nutting squad. On the promptings of the South Armagh Brigade, Collins became a member of Sinn Féin in Newry. The South Armagh IRA wanted a hard-line militarist in the party as they were opposed to the increasing emphasis of the republican leadership on the political over the military wing of the movement. Collins was not, however, selected as a Sinn Féin candidate for local government elections. In part, this was due to his suspicion of the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership, whom he suspected of running down 'the war'. He had a public dispute with Gerry Adams at the funeral of an IRA man, killed in a failed bombing, where Collins was accused of calling Adams a 'Stick' (a derogatory name for Official IRA members, who were considered traitors by Provisional IRA supporters). In Killing Rage, however, Collins denies the claim, instead suggesting that he only accused Adams of taking actions likened to those of a 'Stick'.

Despite his militarist convictions, Collins found the emotional strain of the IRA campaign, along with the pressure from the security forces intolerable. On two occasions, he was arrested under anti-terrorism legislation and held in Castlereagh holding centre for seven days and subjected to 24-hour interrogation. On the second of these occasions, in 1985, the police were enraged by the killing, on the day of Collins' arrest, of nine of their colleagues in an IRA mortar attack in Newry. Towards the end of his time in custody, Collins reportedly "broke" and said that he was prepared to co-operate with the police.

In his book, Collins says that the strain of the interrogation exacerbated doubts that he had already had about the morality and direction the IRA campaign. He argues in his book that the republican leadership had already decided that the "war was over" by the mid-1980s and was already manoeuvring Sinn Féin to participate in what later became the Northern Ireland peace process.