Who Killed Denis Donaldson?

DENIS DONALDSON: RIP

Published 4/13/06 in the Valley Advocate

Denis Donaldson was a friend of mine. On April 4th he was found tortured and shot-gunned to death in the ratty cottage in Donegal to which he had fled last December after admitting he was a British spy inside the IRA and Sinn Fein for 20 years.

I first met Denis in 1981 as a cub reporter for the Daily Collegian trying to make my bones covering the IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s jails. Ten prisoners starved themselves to death that summer to protest Margaret Thatcher’s revoking their status as political prisoners..

After a long interview at Sinn Fein’s west Belfast headquarters, where he was an awkward but effective press spokesman, he invited me home for dinner and I lived with his family for that heroic, heart-breaking summer as those emaciated wraiths were buried by tens of thousands of mourners (Several of whom had been elected to the Irish and British parliaments while going 60, 63, 68 days without food.)

Denis came from a long republican tradition: his maternal grand parents were with the rebels during the Easter uprising against British rule which created the Irish republic. His father was an IRA man and spent World War II interned by the British without trial. In the early 1970’s, Denis and two of three brothers also were interned by the British as IRA men, and with the police sweating his youngest brother for information on the older ones, his mother packed the youngest off to America -- from which he never returned.

When the news came last December that Denis had outted himself as an informer for the British, I was scandalized – but it was like finding out a favorite uncle had been a commie spy in the Cold War, it’s over. Denis’ war was supposed to be over too.

I followed stories about him in the Irish press. The day before he was killed I read an interview by a reporter who detailed where and how Denis was living – in an old shack without running water nor electricity where he chopped his own wood for heat. I thought then I’d like to find Denis, talk to him. Tell him I do not judge him, but still owe him for his hospitality from years ago.

And now he is dead, and his last seconds were spent trapped in an old shack, raising up a hand to fend off four shotgun blasts. He saw his killers coming, and he probably knew them.

And all I can think now is: What a waste. What an unspeakable waste. In Northern Ireland, South Africa, the former East Germany, all such places where spies, informers and traitors were used by Authority to undermine people’s desires for change, for freedom.

And to what end? The IRA was so infiltrated that, as the Atlantic Monthly noted recently, at one point in the 1980’s the IRA’s top spy catcher was interrogating its top volunteer on suspicion he was really a top British agent – he was, but so was his interrogator!

South Africa’s ANC, too, was thoroughly infiltrated at home a abroad. East Germany had almost literally half the country spying on the rest. And what good did all this spying ultimately do? None, ultimately. It did not, could not, change the political outcome in those countries. All those informers, the ruined families, gruesome executions, and all it did was delay what the world now acknowledges as an inevitable outcome: apartheid was a freakish throwback and had to end; the Berlin Wall was so rotted inside a few thousand citizens tore it down.; and the Irish will live in peace because a 21st century European Union has no place for dirty sectarian wars when a clear path to peace is at hand.

All that spying -- the coercion, blackmail, and bribes -- which creates informers, all it did was delay the day of deliverance which the march of history had scheduled. And when the inevitable new day dawns, it leaves thousands of Denis Donaldsons lurking in the shadows, in a permanent dusk, hated by their old comrades and their old handlers as well. For the police and soldiers despise snitches as much as the rest of us do. As Denis once did

And yet governments still believe that spies and spy masters are an essential part of politics. Is not our national shame over reports from Guantanomo Bay and Abu Gharab a by-product of this faith in the shadowy world of spies and informers? That secret information and secret agents are more powerful than open politics and negotiations?

Being of Irish descent I thought I too had hard and fast beliefs about informers and traitors. Now, like all the Irish everywhere, I’m sorely sick to learn of one more gruesome death from a Troubles which should finally be over. Instead the Orangemen will point fingers and refuse to govern with Sinn Fein, and the Fenians will close ranks and refuse to expose Denis’ killers. And the British and Irish governments will continue to bob around like rubber ducks in a storm-tossed bathtub.

Rest In Peace Denis Donaldson. Thank God your mother Nelly died years ago. The shame of it would’ve pained her to death. As it is, she has already welcomed you home. If only your legacy could be that no one ever need be recruited to inform again. But that day will never come so long as governments truly believe the dark shadowy world of spies and informers is the best place to make, or prevent, political change.
925 words

Joe Gannon, a former freelance journalist in Central America and Northern Ireland, is now a screenwriter living in Western Mass. ganvolp9@cs.com