opinion of informers; as he put it, "there is nothing worse in Ireland than being an informer." However, he felt it was the only way to stop the IRA from luring teenagers into their ranks and training them to kill. Soon after being approached by the IRA to re-join he returned to Tralee from London, where he arranged a clandestine meeting with an officer of the Garda Special Branch in a local cemetery, at which O'Callaghan expressed his willingness to work with it to subvert the IRA from within. At this point, O'Callaghan was still opposed to working with the British Government. A few weeks later, O'Callaghan made contact with Kerry IRA leader Martin Ferris and attended his first IRA meeting since 1975. Immediately afterwards, he telephoned his Garda contact and said, "We're in". According to O'Callaghan, "Over the next few months plans to carry out various armed robberies were put together by the local IRA. It was relatively easy for me to foil these attempts; an occasional Garda car or roadblock at the 'wrong time'; the routine arrest of Ferris or myself; or simple 'bad planning', such as a car arriving late – a whole series of random stratagems". During the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison, he attempted to start his own hunger strike in support of the Maze prisoners but was told to desist by the IRA for fear it would detract focus from the prisoners. O'Callaghan successfully sabotaged the efforts of republicans in Kerry from staging hunger strikes of their own. In 1984 he notified the Garda of an attempt to smuggle seven tons of AK-47 assault rifles from the United States to Ireland aboard a fishing trawler named Valhalla. The guns were intended for the arsenal of the Provisional IRA's units. The shipment had been organised by the Winter Hill Gang, an Irish-American crime family of South Boston, Massachusetts. As a result of O'Callaghan's warning, a combined force of the Irish Navy and Gardaí intercepted the boat that received the weaponry, and the guns were seized. The seizure marked the complete end of any major attempt by the IRA to smuggle guns out of the United States, which ended three years earlier with the arrest of the primary IRA's gunrunner George Harrison by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). O'Callaghan claimed to have been tasked in 1983 by the IRA with placing 25lb