LEADING Belfast republican and travel journalist Gerry O’Hare has died at the age of 79.
Mr O'Hare, who had suffered ill health for some time, died in Belfast yesterday.
A convicted IRA member he was former editor of the weekly republican paper An Phoblacht.
In more recent years he has been best known as a travel writer.
He joined the Provisional IRA when the Troubles broke out in 1969 and became a high ranking member. He fled across the border in the early 1970s and was imprisoned for IRA membership.
Mr O’Hare was one of the IRA prisoners who helped restrain prison officers in the exercise yard of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin when a hijacked helicopter landed there in October, 1973.
Three leading IRA men - Seamus Twomey, Kevin Mallon and JB O’Hagan - escaped in the helicopter.
Along with other IRA inmates he was transferred to Portlaoise Prison and on his release he became editor of An Phoblacht. He was a close friend of former IRA Chief of Staff Daithi O’Conaill and maintained his links with the republican movement up until his death.
Mr O'Hare started working for the Irish Press Group in the late 1970s and went on to work on the newsdesk before becoming the Irish Press travel editor. Unusually for a travel writer he was banned from travelling to both the US and UK because of his republican links and was still the subject of outstanding arrest warrants in Northern Ireland.
He later founded the magazine Travel Extra when the Irish Press Group closed in 1995.
His first wife Rita O’Hare is the Sinn Féin representative in Washington DC. He married journalist and author Anne Cadwallader, who survives him, in the 1980s.
