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Denis Donaldson
Denis Martin Donaldson (1950 – 4 April 2006) was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin. He was killed following his exposure in December 2005 as an informer in the employ of MI5 and the Special Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary). While it was initially believed that the IRA were responsible for his killing, the Real IRA claimed responsibility three years later.
His friendship with French writer and journalist Sorj Chalandon inspired two novels: My Traitor (published 2007) and Return to Killybegs (published 2011).
Donaldson had a long history of involvement in Irish republicanism. He joined the IRA in the mid-1960s while still in his teens, well before the start of the Troubles. According to a former friend, Sinn Féin activist Jim Gibney, writing in the Irish News, he was a local hero in Short Strand in 1970 because he took part in the gun battle at St Matthew's chapel between Ulster loyalists and Irish nationalists.
Donaldson was a friend of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and the two men served time together in Long Kesh for paramilitary offences in the 1970s. Donaldson was accused by an unnamed republican source of being part of the IRA team that carried out the La Mon restaurant bombing in 1978, one of the most notorious bomb attacks of the Troubles.
In 1981, he was arrested by French authorities at Orly airport along with fellow IRA man William "Blue" Kelly; they were using false passports and Donaldson said that they were returning from a guerrilla training camp in Lebanon. At the 1983 general election, Donaldson was the Sinn Féin candidate in Belfast East, but only polled 682 votes. In the late 1980s, he travelled to Lebanon again and held talks with Lebanese Shia militias Hezbollah and Amal in an effort to secure the freedom of Irish hostage Brian Keenan.
As the Sinn Féin leadership under Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness turned toward a peace process strategy, Donaldson was dispatched to New York City, where he helped establish Friends of Sinn Féin, an organisation that solicited mainstream political and financial support for the new strategy while attempting to isolate hard-line activists in Irish Northern Aid and other support organisations in the United States. Martin Galvin, a Bronx-based Irish-American attorney and future dissident republican, later claimed that he had warned the republican movement's leadership that he suspected Donaldson of being a British government informer.
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 Service of Northern Ireland investigation into an alleged republican spy ring during the Stormontgate affair
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Denis Donaldson
Denis Martin Donaldson (1950 – 4 April 2006) was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin. He was killed following his exposure in December 2005 as an informer in the employ of MI5 and the Special Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary). While it was initially believed that the IRA were responsible for his killing, the Real IRA claimed responsibility three years later.
His friendship with French writer and journalist Sorj Chalandon inspired two novels: My Traitor (published 2007) and Return to Killybegs (published 2011).
Donaldson had a long history of involvement in Irish republicanism. He joined the IRA in the mid-1960s while still in his teens, well before the start of the Troubles. According to a former friend, Sinn Féin activist Jim Gibney, writing in the Irish News, he was a local hero in Short Strand in 1970 because he took part in the gun battle at St Matthew's chapel between Ulster loyalists and Irish nationalists.
Donaldson was a friend of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and the two men served time together in Long Kesh for paramilitary offences in the 1970s. Donaldson was accused by an unnamed republican source of being part of the IRA team that carried out the La Mon restaurant bombing in 1978, one of the most notorious bomb attacks of the Troubles.
In 1981, he was arrested by French authorities at Orly airport along with fellow IRA man William "Blue" Kelly; they were using false passports and Donaldson said that they were returning from a guerrilla training camp in Lebanon. At the 1983 general election, Donaldson was the Sinn Féin candidate in Belfast East, but only polled 682 votes. In the late 1980s, he travelled to Lebanon again and held talks with Lebanese Shia militias Hezbollah and Amal in an effort to secure the freedom of Irish hostage Brian Keenan.
As the Sinn Féin leadership under Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness turned toward a peace process strategy, Donaldson was dispatched to New York City, where he helped establish Friends of Sinn Féin, an organisation that solicited mainstream political and financial support for the new strategy while attempting to isolate hard-line activists in Irish Northern Aid and other support organisations in the United States. Martin Galvin, a Bronx-based Irish-American attorney and future dissident republican, later claimed that he had warned the republican movement's leadership that he suspected Donaldson of being a British government informer.
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 Service of Northern Ireland investigation into an alleged republican spy ring during the Stormontgate affair