Siobhán O`Hanlon (1963 - April 11, 2006)[1] (born in North Belfast, Northern Ireland) was a Provisional Irish Republican Army member and Sinn Féin official who routinely assisted Sinn Féin president and Member of Parliament Gerry Adams.[2]
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O'Hanlon was born in North Belfast, one of six children of a republican family. Her father, Sam, had been interned and her maternal uncle was IRA Army Council member Joe Cahill, who died in July 2004. She spoke of pride in being related to Cahill.[3]
O'Hanlon’s mother, Tess, was seriously injured in one of several loyalist bomb attacks made on their home. Her brother Rory was shot by loyalists when he was a teenager.[4] One of her sisters, Eilis O'Hanlon, is a newspaper columnist who is often critical of Sinn Féin, and remained estranged from Siobhán at the time of Siobhán's death.[1][5]
O'Hanlon married Patrick Sheehan with whom she had a son, Cormac.
O'Hanlon was a member of the first Sinn Féin delegation to meet the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Downing Street in December 1997. She was heavily involved in Sinn Féin's negotiating team at Stormont in the run up to the Good Friday Agreement.[6] In October 2001, she arranged and accompanied Adams on a visit to South Africa where they met Nelson Mandela and unveiled a memorial to ten republican hunger strikers who died in Northern Ireland in 1981. The memorial was located at Robben Island Prison where the former African National Congress leader was jailed.[7] O’Hanlon was also a member of Sinn Féin’s Belfast Executive and participated in the peace process negotiations in Stormont which is the old Northern Irish government building.[8]
In 1983 O’Hanlon was jailed after being found in a bomb-making factory.[9] She served four years of a seven-year sentence for explosives offences.[10] She was again arrested in Los Angeles County in 1989, briefly jailed then deported after admitting she concealed her conviction on US immigration forms.[11]
Some British newspapers have accused O’Hanlon of being involved in an attempted Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing in Gibraltar, prevented by the SAS in Operation Flavius.[12]
In 2009 Professor Christopher Andrew was given access to MI5's records to prepare a book for the centenary of the organisation. The book contains a surveillance photo of O'Hanlon taken in Gibraltar in 1988, prior to the shootings of three other IRA members by the SAS. It also contains a map of her movements. The files state that she noticed Spanish intelligence officers following her in Spain and returned to Ireland.[13]
O'Hanlon died from breast cancer at age 43 having being diagnosed three and a half years earlier. In that time she became a breast cancer activist who organized a conference as a way of bringing activists together to talk about breast cancer, raise awareness and draw attention to the mobile breast cancer screening units.[2]
O'Hanlon also co-founded the West Belfast Festival called Feile an Phobail and devoted many years to its success, and she performed voluntary work for adults with Down syndrome.[14]
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams was a pallbearer at O'Hanlon's funeral which was attended by more than 1000 mourners.[15] He eulogized: "She headed up our office here in West Belfast. When we think back to that time it was a very dangerous and difficult ... Comrades and friends were killed or wounded. And every day we picked ourselves up and worked on." [2] Adams dedicated his commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising to O'Hanlon.[16] Danny Morrison for the Daily Ireland wrote: "We shall benefit from the work Siobhán did in her life - in the freedom struggle, in the peace process, in the bridges she built, the international fraternities she established and maintained, for the goodwill she engendered towards republicanism - and for the huge political enterprises to which she contributed." [17][18]