Martin O'Hagan, the 51-year-old journalist assassinated in Co Armagh on September 28th, was a former paramilitary who rejected violence and worked uncompromisingly at his adopted trade, detailing the close links between crime and terrorism in Northern Ireland. Like his counterpart in the Republic, Veronica Guerin who was assassinated in June 1996 in Dublin, he made dangerous enemies.
He came from a not untypical Northern Catholic family with a background in British military life and republicanism. His father served in the British army and Martin O'Hagan spent his childhood in married quarters in British army on the Rhine (BAOR) camps in Germany. His grandfather was also a soldier and was evacuated from Dunkirk.
The O'Hagans and their six children returned to Lurgan when Martin O'Hagan was seven years old. His father opened a TV repair shop and the family lived in Ulster Street in Lurgan which, at the time, was religiously mixed. After school he worked for his father erecting aerials.
The family's local links to republicanism led him to join the Official IRA in his mid-teens. The Troubles broke out when he was 19 and he became involved in action against the police and army in Lurgan. He was a well-known and active Official IRA member in the north Armagh area and was among the first group of republicans to be interned in 1971. He was released a year later.
On the morning of December 15th, 1972, an Official IRA unit in Lurgan ambushed and shot dead RUC Constable George Chambers while he was delivering a Christmas present to a young girl from the nationalist Kilwilkie estate who had been injured in a traffic accident involving an RUC vehicle.
The incident, described in newspapers as the killing of the "RUC Santa" was one of more shocking killings of the early part of the Troubles. In May 1972 the Officials shot dead a young Catholic man from Derry, Ranger William Best, who had joined the Royal Irish Rangers. In February 1972, in retaliation for the "Bloody Sunday" killing of protestors in Derry, the Officials planted a bomb in the headquarters of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot in England. The bomb killed seven people: the Regiment's Catholic chaplain, five cleaning ladies and a gardener. These incidents led to the Official IRA's declaration of a ceasefire, but elements of the organisation remained active.
On April 18th, 1973, the Official IRA opened fire on soldiers in Edward Street in Lurgan and Martin O'Hagan and another young man were captured almost immediately by another army patrol operating nearby.
In March 1974, he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for possession of two rifles, an Armalite and an M1 carbine that had been used in the attack.
The time in prison provided an opportunity for Martin O'Hagan to break from his paramilitary background and start a new life. He began studying with the Open University and finished off his degree in sociology on his release in 1977 at the University of Ulster.
He despised the sectarianism of Northern Ireland life and married a local Protestant girl, Marie Dukes. The couple had three daughters. His family was central to his life.
He was unemployed at the end of his studies but in the early 1980s he received an ACE scheme grant which helped him work with the political periodical, Fortnight.
When the first serious trouble over the diversion of the Drumcree Orangemen from the Catholic "Tunnel" area of Portadown, broke out in the mid-1980s he began working for mainstream newspapers, initially with The Irish Times, as a freelance.
However, his forte was in tabloid jour and he soon began work for the Northern edition of the Sunday World under its then Northern Editor, Mr Jim Campbell. Mr Campbell was himself shot by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) after publishing a story about the notorious Co Armagh UVF assassin, Robin Jackson, who died of natural causes last year. Mr Campbell survived the assassination attempt and was one of the pallbearers at Martin O'Hagan's funeral on Monday.
Martin O'Hagan was completely accepted into the Belfast press community where he was admired for his hard work and his eye for a good story. He was an active member of the National Union of Journalists.
Aside from his insightful stories on terrorists, he had a knack for muck raking. One of his favourite themes was the exploration of double standards among supposedly strait-laced Protestant loyalists.
He once wrote a story accompanied by a picture of an Armagh Orangeman in full regalia and alongside it another photograph from a sex-contact magazine showing the same man, naked and with a box number covering his genitalia. Martin O'Hagan's move into journalism was in keeping with a trend among former Official IRA members during the 1970s and 1980s. The Officials were suspected of having a strategy of infiltrating and influencing the national media in Ireland. Some of his former Official IRA associates, including the commander of the movement's "military" wing which is known as "Group B", were among the mourners at his funeral.
There is nothing to suggest, however, that Martin O'Hagan was influenced by any specific direction in his journalist career other than his own working class anti-establishment, socialist leanings.
In 1991, he emerged as a key source for the material in the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary "The Committee". It was later alleged that he had received several thousand pounds from the programme makers and that he had "briefed" one of his local contacts about what to tell the Channel 4 journalists. This man claimed to have information about a so-called "Inner Circle" and a group called the "Ulster Central Co-ordinating Committee" (UCCC). This committee allegedly comprised loyalists and security forces members who came together to direct sectarian assassinations. The man later recanted his evidence and remains an unreliable witness The Dispatches programme led to a prolonged series of court cases including several libel cases, some of which are still to be resolved.
At about the same time that the controversy was raging over the Channel 4 programme, he had started writing about the extreme UVF figure, Billy Wright, who was then embarking on a murderous sectarian campaign in north Armagh.
Wright broke from the UVF and founded the nakedly sectarian Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), the group which is almost certainly responsible for Martin O'Hagan's murder. In 1992, Wright intended to murder Martin O'Hagan because of the attention he was receiving in the Sunday World. The threat was sufficient to cause him to leave Northern Ireland to work for his newspaper's office in Cork. He could return to his family only fleetingly.
He finally felt safe to return home with the declaration of the republican and loyalist ceasefires in 1994. (Wright was shot dead in the Maze Prison by republicans on New Year's Day 1998)
Martin O'Hagan continued his work exposing the criminal activities of the North's paramilitaries. Because of his and his colleagues' work the Sunday World's Belfast offices were attacked twice with bombs. The staff were shaken and escaped injury but continued with their work. Martin O'Hagan received several death threats in recent years and was issued with a handgun by the RUC for his own protection. As part of the "normalisation" package introduced under the Belfast Agreement his and many other "at-risk" people in Northern Ireland recently had their personal protection weapons licences withdrawn.
He had an impressive list of contacts in both loyalist and republican camps as well as in the security forces. In 1989, the IRA captured the address book of a senior police officer it had assassinated and found Martin O'Hagan's name and telephone number in it. He was invited to south Armagh ostensibly for an interview but was then bound and hooded. He told friends later he believed he was going to be killed and said he shouted at his captors: "You bastards are going to kill me." He said that a voice behind him replied: "We're not, but there are a lot of others who lay where you are lying and who were shot."
In the weeks before his murder, he had expressed concern that he was possibly under surveillance by members of the LVF. He had moved home earlier this year to Tandragee Road close to a housing estate where the LVF is active. The group has harboured a grudge against him because he had written about how it is centrally involved in a large illegal drug distribution network.
The assassination of Martin O'Hagan was claimed in the name of the "Red Hand Defenders". The RUC says this is a cover-name used by the LVF and its affiliate, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The same cover-name was used after the murder of the Lurgan solicitor, Mrs Rosemary Nelson in 1998 and at least two other murders. Statements issued in the same cover-name have also threatened other journalists' lives.
Martin O'Hagan is survived by his wife, Marie and daughters Cara, Niamh and Martina.
Martin O'Hagan: born 1950; died, September 2001