Sinn Féin official Denis Donaldson had admitted he had been a British intelligence agent for 20 years, party president Gerry Adams said yesterday during a hastily arranged press conference in Dublin. Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent, reports.
Mr Adams said Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers had called to Mr Donaldson's home last Wednesday to warn him he was about to be revealed as a British agent and his life was in danger.
Facing questions, Mr Adams said he had had no suspicions about Mr Donaldson, but he had long suspected British intelligence involvement in the so-called "Stormont spy ring".
The Northern Ireland executive and assembly collapsed in 2002 after PSNI officers raided the Sinn Féin offices in Stormont. "We knew that there was no Sinn Féin spy ring in Stormont," Mr Adams claimed.
"This was a carefully constructed lie created by the Special Branch in order to cause maximum impact," said the SF leader, who was accompanied by senior party figure Gerry Kelly.
"The fact is that the key person at the centre of those events was an SF member who was a British agent," said Mr Adams, who emphasised that Mr Donaldson was not at risk of physical harm from republicans.
He said he became convinced "that there was somebody wrong in all of this" following the arrests of Ciarán Kearney, William Mackessy and Mr Donaldson after the PSNI's raids.
His suspicions deepened last week, he said, after charges against all three were dropped once the prosecution said it would not offer evidence "in the public interest".
The British government's own aims, he said, were being subverted by its security and military, which opposed the Good Friday agreement and refused to accept that "the British war in Ireland is over".
"They are manipulating the situation for their own narrow ends," he said, adding that they had "blackmailed, bullied, coerced, used and abused" informers before throwing them to one side.
Following the PSNI's visit last Wednesday, Mr Adams said Mr Donaldson went to Sinn Féin's Northern Ireland chairman Declan Kearney, who was arrested and later released without charge in 2002 in connection with an alleged IRA burglary at Castlereagh police station.
Mr Kearney told him to go to his solicitor, Peter Madden. Mr Adams said he told Mr Kearney to speak in detail with Mr Donaldson, accompanied by a colleague, Leo Green.
During this meeting, in Sinn Féin's Falls Road office, Mr Donaldson admitted his 20-year long ties to British intelligence and said that he had accepted money for his work.
Senior party figures then subsequently met and expelled him from Sinn Féin.
Mr Adams said he believed that "the securocrats" forced Mr Donaldson's "outing" as a spy, in order to create a new crisis in the runup to the Independent Monitoring Commission's report in January.
The commission must declare that the IRA has finally ended all of its operations if there is to be any chance of getting Northern Ireland's political institutions back into operation.
Questioned about the damage Mr Donaldson has done to the party, Mr Adams played down his importance, although this was strongly disputed by senior Irish officials last night.
"He was not a member of our negotiating team. He was not involved in any of the senior leadership forums within the party. He was not a member of the ard comhairle. But, yes, he was a long-standing member," Mr Adams said.
Asked if the revelation would damage the party's confidence, Mr Adams said: "For every agent there are tens of thousands of good, solid republicans."