In N. Ireland, Fate Met a Marked Man

No one seemed surprised at the discovery of a body on Doran’s Hill Road, stabbed and beaten beyond recognition. The Roman Catholic residents of Bancroft Park housing project didn’t need police to tell them whose it was, either.

The slaying of 45-year-old Eamon Collins, an Irish Republican Army defector, was a death foretold. The question on his neighbors’ lips was not why he was killed or even who did it--they assume it was the IRA--but why a marked man had insisted on remaining in the community that shunned him in order to meet a fate written on the wall in black paint.

“I can’t understand why he would make so many enemies and stay among them,” a neighbor said. “He was either a very brave man or a very stupid man.”

To opponents of Northern Ireland’s peace process, the brutal killing of Collins last week is proof that the IRA will neither forgive its enemies nor abandon the use of violence, and that last year’s Good Friday agreement to end a 30-year conflict between Protestants and Catholics cannot work.

The paramilitary organization is already under fire from the British government and Protestant politicians for a recent wave of “punishment” beatings and shootings in its own community, and it is under mounting pressure to relinquish its weapons before its political wing, Sinn Fein, can take part in a power-sharing government.

Most political observers believe that Collins’ death will probably not spell the end of an agreement designed to halt sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics. Yet the ugly killing provides a window into a region raised on violence and, despite peacemaking, still bound by the rules of war.

Source of Information for Assassinations

A native of this town near Northern Ireland’s border with the Irish Republic, Collins joined the IRA in the late 1970s to fight for the expulsion of Britain from Northern Ireland and the province’s unification with the Republic of Ireland.

He served as an intelligence officer, gathering information on targets for assassination through his job as a customs officer in Newry. While he never pulled the trigger, he served as a scout or provided logistical support in at least five and possibly as many as 15 IRA killings before he was arrested in 1985. He broke under police interrogation.

Twelve men faced charges as a result of the information he gave, but he later retracted his statements, saying they had been extracted under force. The men were freed along with Collins.

The IRA ordered Collins into exile for blowing the whistle, and he stayed away for several years, feeling betrayed by the movement he had embraced.

Eventually, he decided to ignore IRA threats and moved back to Newry with his wife and four children. He began to speak out against sectarian violence on television and in a book about his experiences in the IRA called “Killing Rage,” published in 1997.

In the book and subsequent articles, Collins identified some of his former colleagues in the clandestine group, attacked many of them for brutality and was repentant about his own participation in years of political violence.

Like Collins, 90% of Catholic voters have also rejected violence as a means of achieving their goal of a united Ireland. Instead, they cast ballots last year to endorse the peace agreement that Sinn Fein signed. Many of them might even agree with Collins’ determination that the IRA’s war of liberation had “failed to defend or advance the cause of Catholics in the North.”

However, the hard-line republicans in Newry would not forgive Collins for publicly denouncing the IRA.

“He committed the cardinal sin. He named names,” one Newry resident said.

“He signed his own death warrant,” a neighbor of Collins said. “People are saying he had it coming. He deserved what he got. The only question was why it took so long.”

“This is a Republican area, and he was an informer,” a third man said with a shrug, indicating that no other explanation was necessary.

The Messiness of Grappling With Past

A small man with a large ego, Collins admitted that he was a “mess of contradictions” grappling with his past.

He had come to think of violence as perverse but, according to those who knew him, still felt proud of the fact that he had been able to operate in the IRA for so long without getting caught or losing a weapon or one of his own men.

He put heavy security doors on the front and back of his small row house but then took regular, solitary walks in the early morning that violated the rules of safety he knew so well from his years tracking IRA targets.

He had informed on the IRA--to the police while under pressure and then willfully to the public--but did not want to be identified with other informants because he had never worked as a double agent and had never taken money from the enemy or gone over to the other side, as others had.

This distinction was lost on neighbors in a town that is home to hundreds of IRA volunteers and supporters and to thousands of Sinn Fein voters. Collins was ostracized; his children were taunted at school. Graffiti would appear overnight on the tombstone-gray walls of the working-class houses as a warning. “Eamon Collins. British Agent, 1985-1999,” read one of the most recent.

Target of a Campaign of Intimidation

Collins was the target of an intimidation campaign whenever he spoke out.

His car was firebombed after he made a television documentary. He was knocked unconscious by a hit-and-run driver about the time the book came out. His mother’s house was burned down after he helped the Sunday Times newspaper defeat a libel charge brought by former IRA Chief of Staff Thomas “Slab” Murphy.

Still, Collins remained in Newry.

Some people considered Collins arrogant for speaking out. Others suggested that, by staying put, he was either being reckless or had a death wish. Still others described his determination as “bloody-mindedness.”

“He was from Newry. It’s where his relatives are and where he felt he belonged. He didn’t leave the place easily,” said Noel Doran, an editor at the Irish News who knew Collins. “He had talked about leaving, but he was stubborn as well and didn’t want to be seen to be leaving under pressure.”

In “Killing Rage,” Collins explained why he chose to speak out.

“By exposing myself to the anger of my former comrades and the families of my victims, I wanted to show that I had thought long and hard about what had happened and that it is possible to become a different person--as we all have to become different people if we are to live together in Northern Ireland without political violence,” he wrote.

“I truly believe that only by confronting our past actions, by understanding the forces which drove us to carry them out, can we hope to create the possibility of a society in which these actions do not occur again.”

Misgivings Near the End of the Saga

The day before his death, Collins told the Irish News that he was considering dropping out of the public eye, not because of IRA threats against him but because the family of one of his victims had complained about his high profile.

The children of Ivan Toombs, a former Protestant soldier killed by the IRA in 1981 after Collins singled him out, said they would seek legislation to prevent former paramilitary members from cashing in on their crimes.

Collins denied that he had sought fame or riches from his past, but he acknowledged that his high profile in the media might be causing the family pain.

“If it is genuine that making comments about the peace process hurts the Toombs family, then I will cease doing that. I certainly don’t want to bring any more grief to those people,” he said in an article that appeared the day he was killed.

“But I think they have to face certain realities, that there are hundreds of people who have been involved in political violence who have been released over the past 30 years--and Northern Ireland is a very small place,” Collins said.

Routine Marked a Final Morning

Too small, apparently, for Collins and his many enemies.

Collins rose before dawn Wednesday to paint over the latest graffiti calling him a “tout”--an informant. He took his family’s springer spaniels out for a walk on that dark and drizzly morning, but sometime later the dogs returned home alone. Police found his bludgeoned body on the muddy roadside, next to an ivy-covered wall.

The breakaway Real IRA, which Collins harshly criticized for rejecting the peace process, denied any involvement with the killing.

Sinn Fein leaders also said the IRA was not responsible for Collins’ death. Yet whether or not his slaying was officially sanctioned, most people believe that Collins was killed by someone in the IRA. And the brutality of the deed would suggest it was revenge.

“It is more akin to a crime carried out by a primitive caveman than it is of a society entering the 21st century,” said Chief Inspector Eddie Graham, who is leading the investigation into the killing.

Collins was buried Saturday as he had lived--shunned by his community.

No more than 50 people walked behind his coffin through the republican stronghold, although a few neighbors said others may have wanted to join the cortege but didn’t dare.

“You’re liable to get your windows broken if you do, no doubt about it,” a neighbor said.

Most doors remained firmly closed against the mourners. A few knots of men and women watched from a distance.

“It’s sad, very sad,” said a neighbor who had known Collins for decades. “He always wanted to be here. He was very Irish in that sense.”

“He fought the Brits because they had invaded,” said Collins’ lawyer, Jason McCue. “He wasn’t going to be pushed off the land by the IRA.”