High-ranking republican Rita O’Hare risked arrest by crossing the border in disguise to visit her dying father, her new memoir reveals.
It was the sole known occasion the late Belfast-born IRA member and latterly Sinn Féin’s representative to the United States set foot in Northern Ireland during a self-imposed exile spanning more than five decades.
She was driven to a nursing home in Newcastle, Co Down by Pat Sheehan, now a Sinn Féin MLA, and his late wife Siobhan O’Hanlon in 2003 to visit her father Billy McCulloch for the final time.
O’Hare, who died in Dublin in 2023 aged 80, left Belfast 51 years earlier as she faced a series of charges, including attempted murder, believing she’d return to her native city within “a couple of years”.
She remained ‘on the run’ for the rest of her life, evading extradition from the Republic on the basis that her alleged offences fell within the political offence exception.
The freshly-published memoir Rita, edited by former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison and featuring a foreword by Gerry Adams, charts her relatively middle-class upbringing and grammar school education in west Belfast before she joined the IRA in her twenties.
The daughter of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, she was exposed to the former’s left-wing, “internationalist” politics from a young age but was drawn to republicanism after unionism’s violent response to the civil rights movement of the late 1960s.
“It didn’t take me long to realise that you could march from here to China for civil rights and the only thing you were certain to get was a baton over your head,” she writes in the memoir.
Married at 17 to Gerry O’Hare, who she later divorced, the mother of three young children was first arrested in February 1971 while taking part in a protest outside the courts in Belfast city centre.
Sentenced to six months imprisonment, she was taken to Armagh Gaol.
Released in August 1971, O’Hare joined the IRA and was shot by the British army weeks later during a gun battle in Andersonstown.
Initially treated in the Royal Victoria Hospital, she was transferred to the military wing of Musgrave Park Hospital where a number of wounded soldiers were patients, including warrant officer Fraser Paton, whom she would later be charged with attempting to murder during the exchange of fire in which she was wounded. According to the book, however, the two never spoke.
O’Hare was bailed in December 1971 but recalls at a later remand hearing being threatened by British soldiers.
“I think I realised then that I could not stay in Belfast – my life was clearly under threat,” the book says.
She moved to Dublin and remained an active republican, latterly alongside partner Brendan Brownlee, and was jailed on explosives charges in the late 1970s, spending three years in Limerick Prison.
On release, O’Hare worked for An Phoblacht/Republican News, editing the newspaper from 1985-90 before becoming Sinn Féin director publicity.
She played key role in the peace process and developed a close friendship with the then US ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith, later being appointed Sinn Féin’s representative in the US, where she’d work in 30-day stints because the UK arrest warrant made her ineligible for a visa.
Recounting her only trip north in more than 50 years, during which time she missed her mother Maureen’s funeral, the book tells how Siobhan O’Hanlon, then being treated for the cancer that ultimately killed her, organised for O’Hare to visit her dying father, in a nursing home 20-odd miles across the border.
She tells how close to the border, her friend who had suffered hair loss due to chemo treatment, gave her one of her wigs to disguise O’Hare’s distinctive red hair.
“I had been determined to make the visit regardless of what would happen,” she says in the book. “Nobody was going to stop me from seeing Billy, my oul Da, for the last time, and saying goodbye.”
:: Rita: A Memoir is published by Greenisland Press.
