Denis Donaldson
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Denis Donaldson (born in 1950 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a former member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Sinn Féin who was exposed in 2005 as a spy in the employ of MI5 and the Special Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary).
Donaldson has a long history of involvement in Irish republicanism. According to his former friend, Jim Gibney, writing in the Irish News, he was a local hero in Short Strand in 1970 because he took part in the IRA's defense of St. Matthew's chapel against a concerted loyalist attack.
He was a friend of Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands. The two men served time together in Long Kesh in the 1970s.
In 1981 he was arrested by French authorities at the airport at Orly along with fellow IRA volunteer, William "Blue" Kelly. The duo were using false passports and Donaldson said that they were returning from a training camp in Lebanon.
In the late 1980s, he travelled to Lebanon again and held talks with both Hezbollah and the Amal militia in an effort to secure the freedom of the Irish hostage Brian Keenan.
Donaldson was recruited as a spy by British intelligence in the 1980s. He was paid for his information. According to the Irish Republican News e-mail bulletin he was an IRA intelligence officer in the mid-1980s. In the late 1980s he represented Sinn Féin in the United States, isolating future hard-line dissidents like Bronx, New York Irish-American attorney, Martin Galvin. Galvin later claimed that he had warned the republican leadership that he suspected Donaldson of being an agent (see [[1]]).
In the early 2000s, Donaldson was appointed Sinn Féin's Northern Ireland Assembly group administrator in Parliament Buildings. In October 2002, he was arrested in a raid on the Sinn Féin offices as part of a high-profile police investigation into an alleged Irish republican spy-ring — the so-called Stormontgate espionage affair.
In December 2005, the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service dropped the spy-ring charges against Donaldson and two other men on the grounds that it would not be in the "public interest" to proceed with the case.
On December 16, 2005, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams announced to a press conference in Dublin that Donaldson had been a spy in the pay of British intelligence. This was confirmed by Donaldson in a statement which he read out on RTÉ, the Irish state broadcaster, shortly afterwards. He stated that he was recruited after compromising himself during a vulnerable time in his life (see [[2]]).
Donaldson is the latest in a string of agents found to be in senior position in the IRA or Sinn Fein. Previous cases of infiltration include:
- Sean O'Callaghan, the alleged head of the IRA's Southern Command who worked with the Garda Síochána, and later with MI5.
- Stakeknife (apparently one Alfredo Scappaticci, a British Military Intelligence agent from West Belfast, who denied being "Stakeknife"), who was the second in command of the IRA's Internal Security Unit, an elite group of IRA Volunteers charged with seeking out, interrogating and executing suspected informers.
Sources
- Profile, Irish Times, December 17, 2005 (subscription required).
- [3], Sunday Times, 18 December 2005.
- [4] Irish Republican News 20 December 2005. (subscription required)