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AFTERWORD

‘A Wilderness of Mirrors’

Denis Donaldson has to be one the most famous (or should that be infamous?) spies of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. That is because of all the people in the IRA or Sinn Féin who might have been or are secretly working for the British, Denis Donaldson, a 35-year IRA veteran and a leadership loyalist of spaniel-type servility, would be at the bottom of most people’s list. And if Donaldson was a traitor then almost anyone could be. That was the message of his unmasking.

The circumstances of Donaldson’s outing as a spy in December 2005 suggest the British had thrown him to the wolves. Along with his son-in-law, he had been facing charges of involvement in a spy ring run by the IRA at the Stormont parliament during the final months of the peace-process negotiations. But the fact that the British chose to indict one of their own agents strongly suggests he was holding back vital intelligence. Bringing him to court was both an act of vengeance and a warning to others who might be tempted to follow suit. Once a traitor, always a traitor.

As the British knew full well when they charged him, the rules of evidence say that the prosecution had to share their knowledge of Donaldson with his co-accused and that included his career as a British spy. Once he was charged he was doomed. The spymaster turned traitor turned reluctant snitch was tossed into the sacrificial flames; it was the IRA’s very own wilderness of mirrors.

The delicacies and ambiguities of the peace process had, of course, shaped all this. Donaldson couldn’t be killed by the IRA because that would be a breach of the ceasefire and so instead he was exiled to a barren little cottage in the wilds of County Donegal with the hope that maybe some day he’d be allowed back. But someone wanted revenge. Four months later he was found dead inside the cottage, riddled with pellets from a shotgun, a weapon whose lack of ballistic singularity sparked a guessing game about his killers’ identity. Years later it emerged that IRA dissidents had been responsible but had stayed silent in the hope that their former comrades would get the blame.

And that, more or less, is all that we know about Denis Donaldson the spy. Why had he turned, how had he been turned? For how long had he worked for the British and what did he tell them? Which section of British intelligence did he work for and how much of all this did he tell his IRA interrogators? And what was it like to be Denis Donaldson in December 2005, exposed for all the world to see as a living lie? Lots of questions, but no answers.

French journalist Sorj Chalandon has gone where too many Irish writers fear to tread these days, on an expedition into the darker waters of the Troubles. A friend-cum-journalistic contact of Donaldson whom he met over the years of covering the story in Belfast for French media, Chalandon has created a fictional version of Denis Donaldson, a much older and in key ways different man than Donaldson, whom he calls Tyrone Meehan.

While Donaldson’s IRA life began in the sectarian cockpit of east Belfast in 1970, Meehan’s starts in Donegal from where he moves to Belfast as a youngster. There he gets caught up in the city’s sectarian strife and joins the IRA. Meehan is in his eighties when he returns to Donegal to meet his maker, nearly thirty years older than Donaldson, and that enables Chalandon to take the reader on a tour of all those Stations of the Cross that mark the journey to the genesis of the Provisional IRA, events that happened before Donaldson’s birth or while he was still very young — from the hanging of Tom Williams in 1942 to the burning of Bombay Street in August 1969.

So this is not an exact replica of Denis Donaldson’s voyage through life, more a skeleton upon whose bones Chalandon has hung some of Donaldson’s real-life experiences and invented others and then travelled inside the ill-fated IRA man’s head to try to answer some of those fascinating questions.

I must confess I came to this book in an unsympathetic frame of mind. I didn’t know Denis Donaldson as well as Chalandon evidently did, but what I did know, I didn’t like. I couldn’t see how anyone could make Donaldson a character worthy of sympathy. The last time I met him was at Drumcree in July 1997 when the Orangemen were allowed to march on the Garvaghy Road to the fury of local nationalists. Donaldson was there to keep an eye on things for the IRA leadership, which had just secretly decided on a second ceasefire and was clearly worried how this might go down with the foot soldiers. As the Orangemen marched through and the police batoned the nationalists into their ghetto, the crowd chanted, ‘No more ceasefires!’ But all I remember of Donaldson is him pestering me to drive over to the Orange camp to buy up Loyalist trinkets that he could sell to his Provo friends in Belfast at a handsome profit. A guy with an eye on the main chance, cynical, self-serving. Arthur Daley meets the IRA.

However, I came away from Sorj Chalandon’s book in a more satisfied mood, although I still don’t like Denis Donaldson. And I say that because Chalandon has managed to get inside the mind of an informer, to lay bare motives, rationalizations, lies and above all else fears that must daily live with such a person. And he reconstructs Donaldson’s mysterious entrée to a life of treachery using a very plausible real-life event as the gateway, which I won’t spoil for the reader by detailing. I don’t know if this was how Donaldson became an agent but it could well have been.

Denis Donaldson may be the model for this story but it is, at the end, a tale about all informers and that is its value. Such people helped shape recent Irish history as much as anyone. But it took a Frenchman to go where Irish writers will not. What a shame.

Ed Moloney

New York, January 2013