Gerry O’Hare obituary: Prominent republican and newspaper man

Born: December 30th, 1940
Died: October 29th, 2020

In assessing the extraordinarily colourful life of Gerry O’Hare, who has died aged 79 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, it can be asserted that he was one of the more significant Irish journalists of his generation.

He was also a former member of the Provisional IRA who had served three terms of imprisonment related to this, yet his generosity of personality won him friends from right across the political spectrum, in a way that was very probably unique.

His former colleague, Eoghan Corry, who worked with O’Hare both in The Irish Press (where the latter was travel correspondent) and later in the magazine Travel Extra, said this week that at O’Hare’s 70th birthday party there were “diehard unionists and people from Enterprise Ulster”.

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One of his closest friends growing up, and for the rest of his life, was the actor Stephen Rea, who was from what might be described as a non-religious Protestant family who lived around the corner from the O’Hare family home on Baltic Avenue in Newington, north Belfast.

He had an unlikely start to a journalistic career. He was born the second of three sons of Jimmy and Anne “Nan” O’Hare (nee O’Neill), and was educated at St Malachy’s College. After schooling he became a bread man for Hughes Bakery, from which he graduated to their accounts department. Decades later these accounting skills were to become highly useful again when he used his redundancy money of just £5,000 after the closure of the Irish Press group in 1995 to set up Travel Extra magazine. His wife, Anne Cadwallader, added another £5,000 and former Evening Herald journalist Tony Barry supplied the computer, at a time when such equipment was still relatively expensive. When Travel Extra was bought in 2001 by Edmund and Maureen Hourican, owners of a business exhibition company, Cadwallader recalled this week, Edmund told her that he had “never seen accounts as closely and accurately kept” as those of her husband.

His attractiveness of personality was vital, too, Anne Cadwallader recalling that while major advertisers normally paid their advertising bills three months in arrears, with Travel Extra, “by sheer force of personality” on her husband’s part, they agreed to pay each month.

Civil rights

It was a happy place at which to arrive in his 50s, but it had come after a dangerous young adult life in Northern Ireland of the 1960s when a younger, educated generation of Catholics and their Protestant allies began agitating for equal civil rights. O’Hare, who had by then become a trade union official, became involved with the People’s Democracy, a radical group composed largely of students at Queen’s University Belfast, although he was never a student there himself.

As the political situation deteriorated , O’Hare joined the IRA, taking the Provisionals’ side after the split in that organisation at the end of December 1969. He was interned in August 1971, an event that prevented him from taking up a scholarship he had been awarded to Ruskin College, Oxford, where he had been due to start studying in September.

Further periods behind bars followed. In September 1972 he was arrested for riotous behaviour and jailed in Crumlin Road prison, then reinterned in Long Kesh until March 1973. In August that year he was arrested in Dundalk and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment in the Republic for IRA membership.

While in Mountjoy, O’Hare was involved in assisting the infamous escape by hijacked helicopter of three senior IRA figures from the exercise yard, in October 1973, which earned him an extra 12 months in prison.

Earlier that year O’Hare and Danny Morrison – a fellow IRA member and Sinn Féin publicity director – had produced a book called Freedom Struggle. This revealed O’Hare’s journalistic abilities, and after his release from prison he became editor of An Phoblacht, a weekly newspaper published by Sinn Féin.

O’Hare was to part company with An Phoblacht in circumstances that have remained contentious; it has been suggested by some that it was due to the collapse of O’Hare’s marriage to Rita O’Hare (nee McCulloch), later Sinn Féin’s representative in the US, and Sinn Féin favouring her over him, but Eoghan Corry, among others, disagrees.

News hound

O’Hare then joined The Irish Press as a reporter in 1977, where he was a noticeably successful news hound, being the first to break the major stories of the collapse of Tara Travel and Bray Travel in the early 1980s, which involved more than 300,000 people losing money, and he became very active in the NUJ’s chapel there. It was also in this period he met, and in 1990 married, Anne Cadwallader from England, hen the BBC’s Irish correspondent. It was to be a very happy union.

Also, while at the Press, he lived in Kinsealy on the northside of Dublin, which brought him into contact with Charles Haughey at Abbeville when the latter was taoiseach. The connection proved vital during the long period when O’Hare was barred from entering either the US or the UK, which was inhibiting to say the least for a travel writer. When, with other editorial staff, he was assigned for computer training to California by the Press group in 1991, Haughey arranged for him to be issued with a passport in the name of one Gerard O’Hehir. On another occasion, while in transit through Gatwick Airport, he was arrested and held for four hours, but was released after the then minister for foreign affairs, Brian Lenihan snr, intervened on his behalf with the British authorities.

That incident led to the composition by fellow journalists Seamus Martin and Seán Mac Connell, who were travelling with him at the time, of a song, The Ballad of Gatwick, which he loved to sing at parties thereafter.

O’Hare is survived by his widow, by Rita (nee McCulloch) and his children from that first marriage, Therese, Jane-Frances and Rory, and by his brothers, Seán and Séamus.