Martin O'Hagan | |
|---|---|
 Press kit photo of O'Hagan | |
| Born | Owen Martin O'Hagan 23 June 1950 |
| Died | 28 September 2001 (aged 51) Lurgan, County Armagh |
| Cause of death | Assassination (gunshot wound) |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Other names | Marty |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Years active | 1978–2001 |
| Employer | Sunday World |
| Organization | National Union of Journalists |
| Known for | Only journalist killed during The Troubles |
| Criminal charges | Firearms offences |
| Criminal penalty | 7 years in prison |
| Spouse | Marie Dukes |
| Children | 3 |
| Relatives |
|
Owen Martin O'Hagan (23 June 1950 – 28 September 2001)[1] was an Irish investigative journalist from Lurgan, Northern Ireland. 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. 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). 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 exposés about his unit's activities and accusing Wright of being a 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. 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. 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. O'Hagan was the only journalist killed while working during The Troubles,[2] and the last killed in the United Kingdom before the death of Lyra McKee in 2019.[3]
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