Eamon Collins

Eamon Collins (1954 – 27 January 1999) was a Provisional Irish Republican Army paramilitary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He turned his back on the organisation in the late 1980s, and later co-authored a book called Killing Rage detailing his experiences within it. In January 1999 he was waylaid on a public road and murdered near his home in Newry in Ulster.

Collins, the son of a cattle dealer, grew up in a middle class Irish family in Camlough, a small, staunchly Irish republican town in South Armagh. Despite the sentiment of the area, the Collins family had no association and little interest in Irish Nationalist politics. Collins' mother was devout Catholic, and he was brought up under her influence with a sense of awe for the martyrs of that religion in Irish history, in its conflicts with Protestantism.
After completing his schooling, Collins worked for a time in the Ministry of Defence in a clerical capacity in London before studying Law at Queen's University, where he became positively influenced by Marxist political ideology.

In Easter 1974, as he walked home to his parents' home in South Armagh during a break from his studies in Belfast, on arrival he found both his parents being man-handled by British troops during a house-to-house raid searching for illegal weapons, and on remonstrating with them Collins was himself seriously assaulted, and both he and his father were arrested and detained. Collins later attributed his crossing of the psychological threshold of actively supporting anti-British Irish terrorism to this incident. Another influence upon his radicalization at this time was a Law tutor at university who had persuaded him that the newly formed Provisional Irish Republican Army was, as well as a means opposing the British military presence in Ulster, a vehicle for Marxist revolutionary politics, in line with the ideological expressions of a younger generation that were now replacing an old guard of the movement that had engaged in petty acts of Fenian paramilitarism in the 1950's-1960's.

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