Martin O'Hagan

Owen Martin O'Hagan (23 June 1950 – 28 September 2001) was an Irish investigative journalist from Lurgan, Northern Ireland.

O'Hagan was born in Lurgan in the north-east of County Armagh in 1950, the oldest of six children.

Both his parents were from Lurgan, but O'Hagan spent a large period of his childhood in British military bases across West Germany due to his father's career with the British Army.

His grandfather had also served in the military, being evacuated from Dunkirk.

When O'Hagan was four his family returned to Lurgan, where he attended school and his father ran a television repair shop.

Following his O Levels, he left education and began working at his father's shop.

His parents soon separated, and his father left for London.

His brother, Rory O'Hagan, was convicted in the 1970s after an Official Irish Republican Army (Official IRA) shootout with the Gardaí in County Cork.

As a teenager, O'Hagan joined the Official Sinn Féin (later the Workers' Party), and made friends with then-general secretary Máirín de Burca, with whom he pelted Richard Nixon's car with eggs during a 1970 visit to Dublin.

He was fined £2 for the incident and let go.

His mother had insisted he live in the Irish capital for a while to escape the political troubles of Lurgan, but this appears to have backfired.

In 1971, a few years after The Troubles began, O'Hagan was one of many republican suspects who was interned at the paramilitary detention centre at Long Kesh (also known as "The Maze").

On 15 December 1972, Police Constable George Chambers and his colleagues were driving through Lurgan's Kilwilkie estate after delivering Christmas presents to the house of an injured child.

While there, they noticed a stolen Ford Cortina and suspecting it to be booby-trapped began evacuating the area.

O'Hagan and his active service unit were hid in a flat nearby, from which they planned to rob a van later that day.

Upon noticing the police, the group left the flat and attacked.

The group fired semiautomatic guns towards the police, with Chambers being shot.

O'Hagan allegedly then stood over his injured body and fired bullets until he had died.

He was arrested and questioned over various crimes, including the murder of a Royal Ulster Constabulary police officer and a British Army soldier, but was eventually convicted and sentenced only for firearms offences in 1973.

After serving five years in Long Kesh prison, O'Hagan began a journalism career with Fortnight and the Sunday World.

He reported on extortion, racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and other organized crimes committed by paramilitaries, like Robin Jackson.

O'Hagan also worked with the Channel 4 programme Dispatches on alleged collusion in multiple sectarian murders by security forces and Loyalists (see Glenanne gang).

His family had a history of Irish republicanism: his uncle was J. B. O'Hagan, who escaped from Mountjoy Prison in 1973, and his cousin was Sinn Féin politician Dara O'Hagan.

The family were Catholic.

He was abducted in 1989 by members of the Provisional IRA, and often seriously angered the Ulster Volunteer Force's Mid-Ulster Brigade leader Billy Wright by writing exposes about his unit's activities and accusing Wright of being an criminal informant for RUC Special Branch.

After Wright was killed in prison by the INLA in 1997, threats continued to be made against O'Hagan's life by members of the new Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), a terrorist organization of dissident Loyalists which Wright had founded to violently resist the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Criminal prosecution of five LVF members was attempted in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but the case for the Crown collapsed after one defendant, who had turned supergrass, was ruled to be an unreliable witness.

British security forces have repeatedly been accused of illegally hindering prosecution of O'Hagan's murderers.

Further accusations of a criminal conspiracy between Royal Ulster Constabulary officers and the LVF in O'Hagan's assassination have also been made by his fellow journalists.

After leaving the Official Irish Republican Army (Official IRA) and serving time in prison, he began a 20-year journalism career, during which he reported on The Troubles in Northern Ireland before being murdered, allegedly by dissident Ulster Loyalist paramilitaries in September 2001.

Born in Lurgan to Catholic and republican parents, several members of his family became prominent in paramilitary activities and politics.

After returning to Lurgan from West Germany, where his father had worked for the British Army, he left school to work at his family's television repair shop.

He soon became involved in both the Official Sinn Féin (which, after renouncing paramilitary activity, evolved into the Workers' Party) and the Marxist-Leninist Official IRA.

On 28 September 2001, while walking home from a pub with his wife, O'Hagan was shot from a moving car and died at the scene.

The prime suspects remain members of the LVF, but no one, to date, has been convicted of committing the crime.

While his membership of the Official IRA was known publicly, alleged key details remained practically unknown until the publication of a 2002 book entitled Milestones in Murder, by Sunday World reporter Hugh Jordan.

The details were summarised in a November 2002 article by Barrie Penrose in The Spectator.

Back home from Dublin, O'Hagan had joined the Lurgan unit of the Official IRA, enjoying their socialist-republican policies and military wing.

He soon became the "adjutant" of the group.

O'Hagan was the only journalist killed while working during The Troubles, and the last killed in the United Kingdom before the death of Lyra McKee in 2019.