Martin O'Hagan
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Owen Martin O'Hagan, (June 23, 1950 – September 28, 2001) was a Northern Irish journalist raised in Lurgan. He is the most prominent journalist to be assassinated during the the Troubles (Eddie Henty, a British photojournalist/photographer was killed on April 24, 1993, by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) lorry bomb which exploded in Bishopsgate, London).
O'Hagan's father served in the British Army. One of six children, O'Hagan spent part of his childhood in the married quarters of military bases in Germany. His grandfather was also a soldier, and saw service at Dunkirk. O'Hagan's family returned to Lurgan when he was seven, and he was educated in the town, leaving after taking O-levels to work in his father's TV repair shop.
As a teenager, he joined the Official IRA's Lurgan unit and served five years in jail for gun-running. He was drawn to the Officials because of their then radical socialist-republican politics, and became active in their military wing. He despised the sectarianism of Northern Ireland life and married a local Protestant girl, Marie Dukes, by whom he had three daughters.
The Officials, from which the far more deadly Provisional IRA split in 1969, declared a ceasefire in 1972. O'Hagan retained his Socialist outlook throughout his life. He studied sociology at the Open University and the University of Ulster.
O'Hagan worked as a reporter for the tabloid newspaper The Sunday World. In this capacity, he wrote about a range of criminals and paramilitaries. In the early 1990s, he wrote several pieces about the Ulster Volunteer Force's Mid Ulster Brigade. He coined the nickname, "the rat pack" for this group and "King Rat" for their leader Billy Wright. Wright attacked the Sunday World's offices in Belfast and threatened to kill O'Hagan. Wright himself was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army in 1997. However, O'Hagan was murdered by the Loyalist Volunteer Force a breakaway loyalist faction founded by Wright, on September 28, 2001.
