SAOIRSE32

Daily Ireland

GEARÓID Ó CAIREALLáIN

If I had been a British spy for over 20 years, I would have been loathe to take the chance that my former comrades had really and truly forsaken the sort of activity for which they had previously been renowned vis a vis dealing with informers.

The one thing I cannot understand about the Denis Donaldson saga is why did he run to Sinn Féin in the end?
If we are to believe that Denis Donaldson was a British spy who, for over 20 years of his life, grafted consistently to thwart the Republican project and advance the British cause in Ireland by touting whatever information he could to his British paymasters, why did he throw himself at the mercy of those he had betrayed when he was unmasked?
Murky is not the word for all this. Dark and dangerous barely convey the half of it either so, like everyone else, I am flaying around in the abyss of ignorance here. But let’s say that Donaldson was a British spy. I think we can all agree on that.
I believe he was outed in the hope that the IRA would kill him, thereby causing a crisis in the peace process, given that Gerry Adams and the IRA told us last July that all such activity had ceased.
Or else he would go to ground and his family would mysteriously disappear from West Belfast, allowing the PSNI to advance their thesis that his life was under threat. Under threat from whom? The IRA, of course. The PSNI, apparently, did tell Donaldson that he was about to be revealed as an informer and that his life was under threat. Why did they even bother to tell him?
Because Gerry Adams and the IRA told us last July that all such activity had ceased. So if someone’s life was under threat from the IRA, even if that someone was a long term and committed informer, bang goes the dump arms order and the new scenario heralded so boldly by last July’s IRA statement. Holding threats is part of the activity that we were told had ceased.
If I had been a British spy for over 20 years, I would have been loathe to take the chance that my former comrades had really and truly forsaken the sort of activity for which they had previously been renowned vis a vis dealing with informers.
When Freddie Scapaticci was outed he also ran into the embrace of former comrades in Sinn Féin. But Scap denied all accusations of touting at first. He held his press conference and appealed to our sense of outrage and decency because he was originally hoping to deny all and brazen it out.
Whenever it became obvious that he had indeed been an informer then he disappeared. I suppose as the reputed former head of the IRA’s nutting squad he knew only too well that taking a chance with these people – even in times of ceasefire – could prove to be both foolhardy and hazardous. So why did Denis not cut and run?
Is there any chance that Denis Donaldson had already been turned by the IRA and that during his time as an informer for the British within the Republican movement he was actually acting as an agent for the IRA and Sinn Féin? Was he passing on information that the IRA and Sinn Féin wanted the British to have. No, I don’t know either, and it does sound more than a little fantastical. But the only way to deal with all this spooks and spies stuff is to think outside the loop.
Going to Sinn Féin following his outing was a pro-Sinn Féin act. It helped the Republican position and tended against the British, who would much preferred to have been able to point to his dead body found in a ditch along the border or his disappearance as proof that the IRA have not gone away, you know. So why would Donaldson choose to help those whom he had betrayed?
Perhaps a note of reconciliation, perhaps a deal was done to allow his family remain in West Belfast and he quietly slip away. Or perhaps he had been previously turned and was really working for the Republicans during the time that the British thought he was touting on their behalf. Or perhaps not.
There really seems to be only one of two possible scenarios likely. On the one hand, perhaps Denis relished working for the British over all those years because he just hated what the Republican movement were trying to achieve.
Or could he have been a reluctant spy to begin with? What if the Brits had caught him, I don’t know, having it off with another woman, or another man, or something like that. And they told him to forget if he could just confirm that a particular car was seen in the Short Strand area last week. Or if he was to stick this phone number in his pocket, and just give Trev a ring next Friday. Or whatever.
Because as soon as he would have done something small and inconsequential like that, then he was in.
The next time they requested information it would be under threat of telling the IRA that he was a tout.
Could he have cut a deal with the IRA to tout for them in order to save his life?
Following the outing of Freddie Scapaticci the Brits put out the names of two other stalwart Republicans who they claimed to have been informers. People made up their own minds. Already one of those two and a third man – a senior Sinn Féin figure in Belfast – are being mentioned as touts this time around. People will make up their own minds.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it seems to me that the purpose behind it all is to counter the strength of Sinn Féin and to stymie their advancing support among the voters North and South. And the best way for Sinn Féin to fight back is to increase support at the polls and take up positions of power in government North and South.
But this business in based upon lies and deceit. Its modus operandi depends upon lies and deceit and making people believe they know the truth when in fact they are hearing only lies and deceit.
Newspapers, television and radio are the perfect media for spreading lies and deceit, because we tend to believe most of what we are exposed to in the media.
But don’t believe it, don’t believe a word. Whatever you believe, believe nothing and you won’t go far wrong.
Agus Nollaig Shona daoibh go léir…

Daily Ireland

Man being sued by bomb relatives is to be freed for Christmas

Ciarán Barnes

Click to view

The father of an Omagh bomb victim has described a decision by the Irish government to free a Real IRA leader on Christmas parole as a “slap in the face”.
Liam Campbell, who is being sued by families who lost loved ones in the bomb, is one of 12 hardline dissident republicans being released from Portlaoise prison for ten days over the festive period.
Joining him will be INLA veteran Dessie O’Hare, the former leader of the INLA in Dublin, and a man described as the second in command of the Munster Real IRA.
The men are expected to be let out on Christmas Eve following a decision taken by Minister for Justice Michael McDowell.
Michael Gallagher, whose son Aiden was among the 29 killed in the 1998 bombing, described Campbell’s release as “farcical”.
He said: “Decisions like this really hurt the families of those who died. It is a real slap in the face.
“Although the governments seem to have jailed most of the Real IRA leadership its members are still being treated with kid gloves. Real IRA leaders being let out on Christmas parole is just another example of this.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice said Christmas parole releases were a matter for the Irish Prison Service.
Although contacted, no one from the Irish Prison Service was available for comment.
Liam Campbell has been in solitary confinement in Portlaoise on a landing shared by criminals since a summer fall-out with Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt.
He refuses to join the E3 landing shared by his Real IRA faction and the hard-line Continuity IRA, the only republican military organisation not to call a ceasefire.
Campbell was jailed for eight years in May 2004 after being found guilty on two counts of being a member of an illegal organisation.
The 43-year-old denied the charges relating to two dates, October 3, 2000 and July 29, 2001. He was arrested in Bettystown, Co Meath, in July 2001 and jailed for five years that October.
The conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal in January 2004 but Campbell was retried on both the original and a subsequent charge the following May.
He was jailed for four years on both charges to run consecutively with the final 18 months suspended. The sentence was backdated to May 1, 2001.
Campbell, from Dundalk, is one of five men being sued in a landmark £10 million (€14 million) civil action by relatives of the Omagh bomb victims.
The others are Michael McKevitt, Seamus Daly, Seamus McKenna and Colm Murphy.

United Press International

By HANNAH K. STRANGE
UPI U.K. Correspondent

LONDON, Dec. 23 (UPI) — The Irish Republican Army is “in turmoil” over suggestions the recent exposure of a Sinn Fein member as a British agent might have been an attempt to protect a more senior spy in the organization.

The group is suspicious the collapse of the trial of three Sinn Fein members accused of spying at the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the subsequent revelation that one of the men had been working for British intelligence for 20 years, was orchestrated in order to maintain the cover of a British agent closer to the heart of the IRA.

This agent was rumored to be a leading figure in Sinn Fein and the IRA, an intelligence source told United Press International.

Alban Magenniss, former mayor of Belfast and a Northern Ireland Assembly member for the republican Social Democratic and Labor Party, said the IRA was taking the theory “very seriously” and all members were “watching their backs.”

The organization was scrutinizing members, interviewing them and checking their bank accounts, he told UPI.

The affair opened up “a cesspit of espionage and counter-espionage, intelligence-gathering and counter intelligence-gathering, and the planting and manipulation of agents,” he said.

Dubbed Stormontgate, the case of the alleged Sinn Fein/IRA spy ring is a murky affair of the type that has long blighted the Northern Ireland political landscape.

With all the elements of a Graham Greene thriller, the episode has been described as “as bizarre as it gets” by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and “preposterous” by senior unionists.

The controversy erupted earlier this month when prosecutors dropped a three-year-long case against three Sinn Fein members accused of operating a spy ring in the offices of the Northern Ireland Assembly, on the grounds the prosecution was no longer “in the public interest.”

The case took a further twist when one of the men, Denis Donaldson, a senior figure in Sinn Fein, admitted Friday he had been working as a British agent for the past 20 years and claimed that the spy ring was a fiction created by British intelligence.

The allegations were vehemently denied by Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, who Monday rejected calls for a public inquiry into the affair.

Both he and Prime Minister Tony Blair denied there was any political hand in the decision to drop the case against the three Sinn Fein members, but their reticence to divulge details has fueled suspicions of an ulterior agenda.

The raids on Sinn Fein’s offices at Stormont in Oct. 2002 brought an end to three years of devolution, and led to the return of direct rule by Westminster.

Sinn Fein claims elements in British intelligence were opposed to the peace process and invented the spy ring in order to bring down the power-sharing assembly.

Party President Richard McAuley told UPI the operation had essentially been a “coup d’etat.”

A small number of people within British military intelligence, Special Branch and the Police Service of Northern Ireland had been “actively working against the peace process,” he said.

He claimed the raids on Sinn Fein’s offices had been “a piece of political theater” organized and orchestrated by the then head of Northern Ireland’s Special Branch, Bill Lowry.

A prominent supporter of the Democratic Unionist Party, Lowry had, along with other rogue elements, been opposed to Sinn Fein taking its place in a power-sharing assembly, McAuley said.

Lowry had known of Donaldson’s status as a British agent and had sacrificed him as part of a “conspiracy concocted by the Special Branch, within the PSNI, the people who were part of the old Royal Ulster Constabulary,” he said. “There is a little nest of vipers in all this.”

He dismissed unionist allegations that Donaldson was in fact a double agent, and that the British government had done a deal with Sinn Fein to drop the case in exchange for IRA disarmament, announced earlier this year.

Donaldson had only revealed his identity after a Special Branch agent visited him last week and told him he was about to be outed, McAuley claimed.

The accusations were no more than “conspiracy theories,” he added.

The DUP’s Ian Paisley Junior said earlier this week that Hain’s denial of a political hand in the collapse of the case was “preposterous,” and called for an inquiry into the affair.

Though he dismissed suggestions that the spy ring was British-orchestrated, Paisley said he believed a Northern Ireland Office official had been authorized to pass information to Sinn Fein.

“If that is the case then the government’s refusal to make a statement is not about protecting the life of an agent but about hiding their own duplicitous hand in the mercy business of aiding and abetting Sinn Fein’s political agenda.”

Donaldson had in fact been a “double agent,” he claimed, “playing both sides for money and power.”

Crispin Black, who formerly worked for the British government gathering and analyzing intelligence in Northern Ireland, said certain facts suggested Donaldson had been some kind of double agent, particularly that Sinn Fein Leader Gerry Adams had insisted he need not fear for his safety. Normally members of Sinn Fein or the IRA who were outed as spies would be tortured and/or killed, he said. “There has to be somebody helping him.”

The whole affair “did not stack up,” he told UPI. Hain and other ministers were being “very tight-lipped” and there was “something odd” in the collapse of the court case.

However it was more likely that there was a political deal to drop the case than that “rogue elements” in the intelligence and security services had fabricated the spy ring, he said.

Black said there was a “long-standing rumor” in the intelligence services that there was a more senior British spy operating in the IRA.

The theory has also been alluded to by Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who told media in Dublin on Monday: “I’ve heard all the rumors; I’ve heard even names mentioned, which I think is very unfortunate and dangerous. But that’s something Sinn Fein has to deal with.”

Rumors though they may be at present, it appears the IRA is taking them extremely seriously.

Alban Maginness told UPI: “Their organization is in turmoil over this, and heads will roll.”

BreakingNews.ie

23/12/2005 - 14:46:34

The Government today insisted they would take all necessary action if it emerged that US security agencies were carrying prisoners through Ireland.

With the Irish Human Rights Commission calling for inspectors to check CIA aircraft, officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs claimed they had clear and explicit assurances that no laws were being broken.

They insisted they had not permitted so-called extraordinary renditions.

“It has also been made clear that the appropriate authorities will act if there is specific and credible information regarding particular aircraft of the type in question,” it stated.

“Once again, however, the Government recalls that it has, on numerous occasions, received explicit, unambiguous and unqualified assurances from the US authorities that no prisoners have been transported through Irish airports, nor would they be, without the express permission of the Government.

“These assurances have recently been reiterated at a very high level.”

The IRHC urged the Government to urgently seek an agreement with US authorities to allow inspections of aircraft suspected of involvement in so-called extraordinary renditions.

In a statement the Department said they would study the recommendations.

But anti-war activists demanded the Government go further and bring in a blanket ban on CIA and American war planes at Irish airports.

Ed Horgan, retired army commandant and peace campaigner, said: “We welcome, belatedly, the pressure. But I would go further than that – all US military aircraft should be banned.

“I believe it is very likely that prisoners were transported through Shannon at some stage in the past and CIA planes were being used in the process of taking prisoners to be tortured.

“The CIA should be banned from going through for past offences.”

Mr Horgan, who was arrested and detained at Shannon yesterday as he travelled to England, said he was very concerned about reports that 2,000 unnamed and undocumented prisoners had been moved out of Europe in the last few weeks.

Dr Maurice Manning, IHRC president, said Irish officials had an obligation to prevent actions on our soil which could facilitate torture.

“In the Commission’s view, and in light of Ireland’s international legal obligations in this field, reliance on diplomatic assurances is not sufficient to protect against the risk of torture and other forms of ill-treatment,” Dr Manning said.

“Given the fact that the obligation on the state to protect against all forms of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment is an absolute one, and given the gravity of the allegations that have been made to date and which are under active investigation by the Council of Europe, it is not sufficient for the Government to rely on such assurances.”

Under domestic and international law Ireland is obliged to ensure prisoners do not travel through the state en route to countries where they may be tortured.

Dermot Ahern, Foreign Affairs Minister, pressed US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice on the matter in Washington earlier this month.

She insisted prisoners where not being transported through Shannon.

Richard Boyd Barrett, Irish Anti-War Movement spokesman, welcomed the recommendation but insisted US aircraft should no longer have free run of Shannon.

“The report makes it clear that it is not acceptable to turn a blind eye to the fact that Shannon may have been used to facilitate torture,” he said.

“It looks fairly clear that the US is involved in organising a very elaborate systems of kidnap and torture. It is good that there is more pressure on the Government to end its shameful connection with the US military at Shannon.”

Belfast Telegraph

By Marie Foy
23 December 2005

Click to view - Dessie O’Hare - photo from IRSM.org

Border Fox Dessie O’Hare, a former head of the INLA, is to be released from jail tomorrow for a week-long Christmas break.

O’Hare was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment in 1988 - one of the longest terms ever handed down in the Republic for an offence other than capital murder.

He was jailed after being found guilty of a string of charges including kidnapping and mutilating Dublin dentist John O’Grady the year before.

O’Hare, who was also the prime suspect in 27 murders, sprang to public notoriety when he and other members of an INLA gang kidnapped Mr O’Grady.

O’Hare used a chisel to cut off the tops of two of Mr O’Grady’s fingers, which were sent to gardai with a ransom demand.

Gardai eventually rescued Mr O’Grady and O’Hare went on the run.

Three weeks later, after a shoot-out, he was arrested and imprisoned.

The terror chief, from Keady, Co Armagh, is among a group of high-security prisoners being let out of Portlaoise prison.

O’Hare is 17 years into his sentence, most of it at Portlaoise, but is expected to be released shortly under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

It is also thought that ex-Real IRA deputy leader Liam Campbell, who was jailed for eight years in 2004 for membership of an illegal organisation, may also be allowed out for the festive season.

The Christmas parole scheme is sanctioned by the Republic’s Justice Minister Michael McDowell.

The Prison Service said that public safety was paramount in their reviewing of temporary release applications.

Ulster Unionist Newry and Mourne Assembly member Danny Kennedy said O’Hare’s release would cause wide concern in the Protestant community.

“He shouldn’t be allowed parole. It will give concern to a lot of my consitituents.

“He has a notorious record and there is no indication that he has ever expressed regret or any degree of remorse.

“There is no indication that he has moved on. I would question whether he is ready to be rehabilitated into the community.”

Newshound

(Jim Gibney, Irish News)

Jim Gibney

I first met Denis Donaldson, or rather I met his name, a few days after June 27 1970. The word on people’s lips on the streets of the Short Strand was that he and a few other teenage members of the local IRA saved the people of the Strand from a loyalist pogrom.

The battle of St Matthew’s, as the attack became known, gave birth to the modern IRA.

Denis Donaldson was a local hero.

Thirty-five years later by his own admission he has entered the hall of infamy as an informer; a traitor to his country, the movement he helped set up, his comrades, his friends and most of all his devoted family.

I can hardly believe I have just written the previous paragraph.

Those of us close to Denis Donaldson were rocked by the informer revelation.

The people of the Short Strand are in shock. It will take time to overcome the personal and the political implications of it all.

But we will.

I am not a stranger to informers. On the three occasions I have been to jail informers put me there. They are an occupational hazard, an unsavoury fact of life. They never stopped me being a republican and never will.

I should not be surprised, but I am, that Denis crossed to the other side.

Freedom struggles carry a heavy price tag.

Every part of me has been tested to its outer limits by the demands of the struggle.

I have walked behind the coffins of teenage comrades of mine.

I visited men and women in prison on hunger strike and watched men dying in the H-blocks.

Behind bars I watched youths grow to men in their middle years.

I saw families’ grief-stricken when loyalist killers claimed a child of theirs.

I experienced the pressure used to break people in interrogation centres.

I know how difficult it is to maintain one’s composure under such pressure.

There is no shame in breaking under interrogation. The shame is in what Denis did when he left the interrogation centre.

He had options and unbelievably he chose to betray everything those who knew him thought he believed in.

Over the last week the word betrayal has been used most frequently by those closest to Denis. It is how we feel.

If there ever was a stereotypical mould for an informer then Denis Donaldson broke the mould.

He was charming, entertaining, witty and clever. He used these fine qualities to conceal his double life of treachery.

I could not count the number of times I shared political ideas with him.

It hurts deeply now to think he passed my thoughts to others for money.

For those close to him the hurt runs deep because it is personal.

For others the cost is measured politically.

A friend described Denis as a ‘listening device’ for the Special Branch.

Rarely did he suggest an original idea. He was not close to Gerry Adams. He was not part of the small group of people in the national leadership of Sinn Féin who developed the peace process.

He did not contribute to shaping the strategy, which led to the IRA’s first cessation.

He was not part of the group handling the day-to-day negotiations with the British and Irish governments over the last 10 years.

The informer revelation starkly confirms what Sinn Féin has been saying for years.

Inside the British system there are powerful individuals who are a law onto themselves.

These are the same people who killed human rights lawyer Pat Finucane and hundreds of innocent Catholics because it served their interests.

It is now clear there was a spy ring at Stormont. It was a British spy ring run by British intelligence agencies.

They organised a coup and overthrew a democratically elected government.

The issue now is will Tony Blair do anything about his agencies?

If Peter Hain’s comments are anything to go by then it is likely we have not seen the last of the securocrats.

There is a very simple message in all of this drama: informers come and informers go.

The struggle for a united Ireland, which they desperately seek to bring down, carries on regardless.

December 23, 2005
________________

This article appeared first in the December 22, 2005 edition of the Irish News.

32csm’s Message Board

Posted on 23/12/2005 at 11:19:13 by P.R.O Comhairle Uladh

A Republican from Dunavon housing estate in Dungannon was busy at work today when he received a phone call from the R.U.C / P.S.N.I informing him they were in his house and would he like to come home, after rushing home he found the Cops taking bags and bags off clothes all his Cd’s and DVDs any letters or paperwork in the house and his home computer, the man told the McKearney / McCaughey Cumann ” if it was not nailed down they took it with them” he was given no explanation for the raid and was not arrested he told members off the McKearney / McCaughey Cumann ” the Bastards took all my family’s Christmas presents” he said he feels like his house and his family have been violated, how can some one march in to your house a couple off days before Christmas and steal your family’s presents with out warrant or reason he said. The McKearney / McCaughey Cumann completely condemn this attack on the mouth off Christmas, it is not just an attack on an individual but an attack on the entire Republican Community in Tyrone at this sacred time off the Year, it shows once again that the only thing the Crown Cops are interested in is destroying Republicanism these attacks only strengthen our resolve we will not bow down to these Orange Loyalist Bigots .

R.S.F East Tyrone

New York Times

By ALAN COWELL
Published: December 23, 2005

Click to view - In Long Kesh prison, Northern Ireland, in the 70’s, four I.R.A. stalwarts, from left: Tomboy Loudon, Gerard Rooney, Denis Donaldson and Bobby Sands. Mr. Donaldson proved to be something else: a spy for Britain. -Press Eye-

BELFAST, Northern Ireland, Dec. 21 - For decades, Denis Donaldson was a prominent insider in the Irish Republican movement in Belfast. He served in prison with Gerry Adams, leader of its political arm, Sinn Fein, and Bobby Sands, the hunger striker, who died in 1981. He trained in Lebanon with Hezbollah militants.

Mr. Donaldson at his news conference last week, when he admitted he was a double agent. Friends said he did not fit that mold.

So it was all the more stunning last week when he held a news conference in Dublin and declared himself a British agent. No one had even a slight suspicion.

“He was affable, humorous, unassuming, intelligent,” said Danny Morrison, a former Sinn Fein associate who is now a novelist. “He didn’t lead a lavish lifestyle; I doubt if he even owned own his own house. He didn’t drink too much. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t drive a flashy car. His wife never wore fur.”

Mr. Donaldson’s double life told a story of awful choices familiar to readers of John le Carré. Behind the open conflict of the Troubles, as the long Northern Ireland conflict is called, lay a war of shadowy handlers pressing informants to the worst of betrayals.

“There had to be a moment when he was compromised,” Mr. Morrison said in an interview. “He would have had to make a choice - between living with the consequences of what they were going to expose about him, or deciding to enter into a pact with people who had inflicted so much suffering on his own community, his friends, himself.”

In the beginning, it must all have seemed much simpler.

According to accounts pieced together from former associates, journalists and scholars, Mr. Donaldson’s early career followed a familiar trajectory in Ulster.

He volunteered for the I.R.A. and in 1971, as a young adult, was caught trying to bomb a distillery and government buildings. He was sentenced to four years and shared prison accommodation with Mr. Adams, establishing a bond that made the betrayal all the more poignant.

Mr. Donaldson, now 55, also featured in a jail-cell photograph of the hunger striker, Mr. Sands, adding to the credentials that underpinned his career in the Republican movement. It also made him an attractive target for the British to turn.

Mr. Donaldson was arrested again, in 1981, in France while returning with a false passport from a Hezbollah training camp in Lebanon, said Brian Feeney, a historian and author of a recent study of Sinn Fein. He was held briefly and released.

This incident was evidence of his role in fostering the international ties that the I.R.A. built up with supporters in the Middle East, including Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya.

Some time during this period, Mr. Donaldson, by his own account, became a spy for the British. The details of his recruitment are unclear and he was not available for an interview. Former associates said they believed that Mr. Donaldson was in hiding in the Irish Republic.

“I was recruited in the 1980’s after compromising myself during a vulnerable period in my life,” Mr. Donaldson said at the news conference in Dublin. Offered a choice of being exposed or informing, he said, “I have worked with British intelligence and R.U.C./P.S.N.I. Special Branch,” referring to the Northern Ireland security police. “Over that period I was paid money.”

Once he had taken a first step into the world of secret intelligence, many people here said, retreat would have been difficult.

“The handlers would start off slow,” said Richard English, a professor of politics and the author of a history of the I.R.A. “They would say: every so often you will give us a bit of something and you will get a bit of money.” But, once he had taken the money, “it was difficult for him to get out” without risking execution by the Irish Republican Army.

Mr. Donaldson’s later work as an agent coincided with a critical period when the armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland was giving way to a political drive by Sinn Fein.

After the 1998 Good Friday agreement, the cornerstone of peace efforts, Mr. Donaldson also became Sinn Fein’s administration chief at Stormont, the provincial parliament.

“As Sinn Fein became more important than the I.R.A., Sinn Fein also became more important to the Special Branch,” said Professor English. From the point of view of the intelligence agencies, “they had a man at the heart of the key bit of the Republican movement, which was the political movement.”

Sinn Fein officials dispute Mr. Donaldson’s importance. “He was in the middle leadership,” said a spokesman for Sinn Fein, who spoke in return for anonymity under the organization’s rules covering contacts with reporters. “He was never a member of the negotiating committee. He wouldn’t have been a senior figure. He wouldn’t have had access to confidential papers.”

For all that, he emerged abruptly into the limelight when the police raided the Sinn Fein office at Stormont in October 2002 and arrested Mr. Donaldson and two other men, accusing them of spying for Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. - a remarkable charge against a man who now says he was a British agent at the time.

Prosecutors dropped those charges without explanation two weeks ago, and Mr. Donaldson insisted last week that the entire episode at Stormont was a conspiracy by intelligence agencies to undermine the Good Friday agreement.

“The so-called Stormont-gate affair was a scam and a fiction,” he said in Dublin. “It never existed. It was created by Special Branch.”

Such allegations have deepened the mystery around Mr. Donaldson.

Was he used by dissident British intelligence as an agent provocateur to torpedo the Good Friday agreement, as some Republicans insist? Had he now been sacrificed to protect the identity of a more senior British mole in the Republican movement? Or was he the reluctant spy, compromised in the 1980’s but never happy to do his secret master’s bidding, as he now claims.

“He has got into this because of a personal situation,” Professor English said, suggesting a possible course of events. “He has not given up his ideas and he is leading a tortured double life. He doesn’t tell them everything.”

Indeed, in the treacherous world he entered, he could barely have afforded to be too open with his handlers. Until its cease-fire in the mid-1990’s, the I.R.A. dealt summarily with informers, known as touts.

“He was someone with iron nerves,” said Mr. Feeney, the historian. “If he had been exposed even five or six years ago, he would have been found in a plastic bag on the South Armagh border with a bullet in his head.”

Moreover, his cover could easily have been blown if the I.R.A.’s internal security agents came to suspect a link between operations of which he had knowledge and operations betrayed.

“If an informer informs at a particular frequency, he’s going to come under suspicion,” said Mr. Morrison, the former Sinn Fein official, who also spent time in prison in the 1990’s.

There would, of course, be routine ways to protect him.

David Shayler, a maverick former officer in MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, said, “He would lead his normal life as a member of Sinn Fein and he would occasionally disappear to meet his handlers.”

Those meetings, according to several people interviewed here, were usually held in wealthy Protestant areas where surveillance by the I.R.A. would be more difficult.

But finally it was his handlers who brought the double life to an end. Mr. Donaldson said police officers visited him at home last week - a sure sign of trouble in Northern Ireland - and told him he was about to be exposed in a newspaper report as a British agent. He faced one more hard choice.

“He had to make up his mind: fleeing into the arms of his handlers or throwing himself on the mercy of the Republican community,” Mr. Morrison said. Reflecting a shift from its more violent past, the Republican leadership chose to use Mr. Donaldson’s confession as further evidence of British perfidy.

Or was it all perhaps one more play in a shadowy game?

“Espionage, double dealing and dirty tricks have been rife on all sides in Northern Ireland for years,” the journalist Niall Stanage wrote in The Guardian. “The peace process did not bring an end to the dirty war.”

RTE

23 December 2005 07:50

The emergency services in Scotland were called to an incident at the Torness nuclear power station south of Edinburgh last night.

The alarm was raised at the plant near Dunbar just before 9pm when staff disposing of spent fuel in the ponds at the plant became aware of a problem.

Officials described the problem as the ‘anomalous behaviour of the irradiated substances’.

A spokesman for British Energy, which operates the plant, said officials were monitoring the situation, but there was no major panic.

He said none of the 38 staff had been evacuated and the plant was continuing to generate electricity.

BreakingNews.ie

23/12/2005 - 07:52:30

Robert McCartney

The sisters of murdered Belfast man Robert McCartney have said the man they believe ordered the killing of their brother is planning to emigrate to the United States.

Catherine and Paula McCartney made the claim in an interview with the BBC last night.

Mr McCartney, a 33-year-old father-of-two, was beaten and stabbed to death in Belfast last January, allegedly by IRA members.

His sisters and fiancée have accused the republican movement of protecting the killers and of trying to intimidate the family into dropping their high-profile campaign for justice.

BBC

The attorney general has revealed that cabinet colleagues were consulted about the “Stormontgate” affair.

Lord Goldsmith said they were asked whether they had “information that might bear on the consideration of the public interest by the DPP”.

However, he said the information obtained from ministers played no part in the decision to drop the charges.

The revelation was made in a letter to DUP leader Ian Paisley, who said he was still pressing for a full explanation.

Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive collapsed in October 2002 following the arrests of three men, including Denis Donaldson, who had headed Sinn Fein’s administration office at Stormont.

Charges against the three were dropped earlier this month after the prosecution offered no evidence “in the public interest”.

A week later, Mr Donaldson was expelled from Sinn Fein. He admitted he had worked as a paid British agent since the 1980s.

Irish Independent

**Talk about having a bad week…

George Jackson and Kathy Donaghy

A BUILDING sub-contractor was last night extradited from the North to face VAT-related charges in the first extradition case taken by the Revenue Commissioners.

Patrick McGonigle (56), who together with his 31-year-old son was shot in the leg in a paramilitary-style shooting in Derry earlier this week, was last night extradited to face six VAT-related charges.

Mr McGonigle, a sub-contractor who has addresses at Woodlands in Derry and at Quiet Water in Muff, just across the border in Co Donegal, is the first person to be extradited from the north to the south on such charges.

A bench warrant for his arrest was issued on March 21, 2003, after he failed to appear in Carndonagh District Court in Co Donegal, for making incorrect VAT returns.

But despite a number of searches by the PSNI, Mr McGonigle remained at large.

However, in the early hours of Tuesday Mr McGonigle and his son, Michael, who lives at Cranlee Park in Derry, were attacked by four masked men, one of whom was armed, outside a fish and chip shop close to the Derry-Donegal border at Culmore.

The gang bundled them into a car and drove them five miles to the Creggan Estate in Derry where they shot both men.

The gang then drove from the scene and the car they used was later found on fire at Quarry Street in the Brandywell area of the city.

The shooting was claimed by the Real IRA. The police said the attack was related to an ongoing feud between rival criminal gangs in the north-west.

They also linked it to the shooting last September of a man who was wounded in the leg at his business premises at Culmore.

Resident Magistrate Barney McElholm was told during the extradition hearing at Derry’s Magistrates’ Court that McGonigle was arrested yesterday morning by police officers at Strand Road PSNI station.

A Crown lawyer said that warrants for McGonigle’s arrest were issued by a District Justice in Carndonagh District Court on December 2, 2003.

McGonigle is charged with six offences of knowingly or wilfully delivering to the office of the Collector General, Sarsfield House, Limerick, incorrect VAT 3 returns, on various dates between March 2000 and April 2001.

The charges are contrary to Section 1078 (2) (a) and (3) of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997.

The lawyer told the court that McGonigle did not want to be legally represented and that he was not contesting the extradition proceedings.

When asked by the Magistrate to confirm that, McGonigle replied “yes”. He also told the court he was waiving his right to appeal his extradition within 15 days and told Mr McElholm: “I do not want 15 days, I do not need that, I want to go today.”

McGonigle, who walked with a pronounced limp in his right leg when he arrived in custody for the extradition hearing, then signed before the Magistrate a form in which he consented to his immediate extradition to the south.

It is understood that the amount of money involved runs to a six-figure sum and is in the region of several hundred thousand euro.

Only three people have been the subject of bench warrants in connection with tax related charges.

All of the three individuals are based in Co Donegal.

Mr McGonigle was remanded in custody when he appeared at a special sitting of the District Court in Donegal town last night. He was charged with a number of tax offences and remanded to appear again on December 29.