Eddie Walsh was born and grew up in Tralee. He joined the Republican movement in 1969, and became a lifeling supporter of the Workers Party. In this article, he describes how he met Martin O’Hagan through their mutual membership of the Official Republican movement. O’Hagan went on to become a high profile investigative reporter with The Sunday World. He probed the activities of Robin Jackson of the UVF. O’Hagan described Jackson as ‘The Jackal’. Jackson was a member of the Glenanne Gang and involved in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the Miami Showband atrocity, the O’Dowd-Reevey massacres and many other violent crimes.
Martin O’Hagan was murdered in Lurgan, in 2001, by Loyalist gunmen who shot him seven times. A 42 year old man was arrested in England on 4 April 2025, and charged with O’Hagan’s murder.
I first came across Martin in the summer of 1970 at a recruit class held in a Parnell Square building in Dublin. I had been a member of Sinn Fein for over a year and had asked the Officer in Command (O/C) on the steps of 30 Gardiner Place to arrange for me to join. I was messaged to wait outside the GPO with a rolled up newspaper under my arm. This seemed like something out of Enid Blyton to me as branchmen were always hanging around there. Soon another from my cumann turned up with his rolled up newspaper as well. Then someone came along and brought us to the meeting.
I was aware that the Dublin O/C had changed but did not know who the new one was. Our training Officer was in the room and soon the new O/C turned up. I regarded him as a lightweight and would never have joined under him. The only thing he was good for as I later discovered was climbing the high walls of Rathfarnham cemetery to recover hidden weapons.
Martin was one of the new recruits. He was living in Clondalkin for free with the family of a man who had gotten a lot of help from Martin’s family during the 1950s/60s border campaign. There was eight of us in the class and we met every Monday night. We always met is a different house and usually a female would answer the door and usher us in to the front room. It was no problem getting somewhere to meet and it was mostly on the Northside but we should have changed the nights as meeting the same night made it too predictable.
One guy in the class talked too much but all the others including Martin were ok and politically sound. The best meeting place was in a student room in Trinity as one of us was a student there. It was somewhere where a Branchman would easily stand out and I think they never figured out that we met there. A couple of times we met in a Trinity building when the student’s flat had other occupants. All of us, including Martin, were sworn into the army in the flat. While the provos were building up in the North they had little support in Dublin then.
Then we were allocated to different areas. I went to a city centre section while Martin went to a West Dublin one. Between Dublin city and county we had 33 sections each with a minimum of eight members so we were a formidable force. I lost touch with Martin after that but I think he moved back to Lurgan.
Some time later he was involved in an attempted robbery in Cork which seemed to be a freelance job and he served a prison sentence for that. When he joined the Sunday World most of his stories were about the Loyalist terrorists who lived there which made him an easy target.
