Eamon Collins (IRA informer)

Eamon Collins (1954 – 27 January 1999) was a Provisional Irish Republican Army member 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 Northern Ireland.

Collins was beaten and stabbed to death in his 45th year by an unidentified assailant(s) early in the morning of 27 January 1999, whilst walking his dogs near the Barcroft Park Estate in Newry along a quiet stretch of country lane at Doran's Hill, just within sight of Sliabh gCuircin (Camlough Mountain).[citation needed] His body also bore marks of having been struck by a car moving at speed. The subsequent police investigation and Coroner's Inquest commented upon the extremity of weaponed violence to Collins' head and face used during the attack.

Rumoured reasons behind the murder were that he had returned to Northern Ireland in breach of the IRA's banning order, and further he had detailed IRA activities and publicly criticized in the media a multiplicity of Irish Republican paramilitary splinter groups that had appeared after the Provisional IRA's 1994 ceasefire, and that he had testified in court against Murphy , Gerry Adams stated the murder was "regrettable", but added that Collins had "many enemies in many places".

After a traditional Irish wake, with a closed coffin necessitated due to the damage to his face, and a funeral service at St. Catherine's Church in Newry, Collins' body was buried at the city's Monkshill Cemetery, not far from the grave of Albert White, a Catholic former Royal Ulster Constabulary Inspector, whose assassination he helped to organise in 1982.