Denis Donaldson was caught in the no-man's land between his British intelligence handlers and the Provisional republican movement he betrayed, writes Gerry Moriarty
There is something awfully grim, sad and wretched about the life, times and terrible death of Denis Donaldson. Amid all the claim and counterclaim in December when Donaldson was exposed as a British agent, a senior Dublin source found a positive comment to make.
The penalty for most exposed informers during the conflict, ahead of the ceasefires and even occasionally after them, was death - plain, pitiless and simple. "Well, at least Denis Donaldson is alive; he's not lying tied up and naked along some lonely Border road somewhere," the Government official said when the latest startling chapter in Stormontgate unfolded.
The import was that we have come a long way, that the brutality is behind us. But the Government official was proved wrong. There is still a mercilessness at the heart of this conflict.
There are many political and security implications arising from the murder of Donaldson, but firstly there is the human dimension. Denis Donaldson cut a lonely, pathetic figure when he admitted he was a British spy on camera to Charlie Bird in a Dublin hotel last December after Gerry Adams earlier dropped the bombshell that he was a British agent.
As Sinn Féin administrator at Stormont, he and two other men were arrested three years ago for being allegedly involved in an IRA spy ring at Stormont. This so-called Stormontgate affair brought down the Northern Executive and Assembly in October 2002. In early December all charges against the men were dropped. Around that period, Mr Donaldson admitted to republicans that he was a British agent and a week or so later made his confession on TV.
He appeared like one of those abject characters that feature in literary thrillers by the likes of Graham Greene or John le Carré, an individual caught in the no-man's land between his British intelligence handlers and the Provisional republican movement which he betrayed.
He followed the republican script for the RTÉ camera, insisting there never was an IRA spy ring, that it was all a "scam and a fiction". But he looked a desperate, haunted man.
At the end of the day this former friend of Bobby Sands was isolated and alone, apparently abandoned by his spymasters and also by Sinn Féin and the IRA, living in a little cottage in a remote part of southwest Donegal not far from Glenties.
The news of his death still had a capacity to shock despite all the years of death and violence. How must his family have felt when the news broke yesterday evening; word that his right forearm was almost severed adding to the horror?
So, who murdered him? Obviously all the people he betrayed over his 20 years as an agent would have a motive. Did the decommissioned IRA on ceasefire decide this was the time to exact revenge for his years of disloyalty?
Could the intelligence people who "ran him" have decided he was too dangerous alive, as Gerry Adams hinted last night? Did dissident republicans kill him? Was it a Provo acting independently?
Don't expect quick answers.
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell asked an interesting question last night: who benefits? A similar question was posed by a British source who suggested that the timing of his death was designed to wreck the prospects of tomorrow's meeting between Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair to unveil a plan to restore devolution this year.
The murder of Denis Donaldson could undermine the chances of that plan succeeding. It will have made it more difficult for Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams to do a deal.
Certainly the murder would benefit those dissident republicans who want the peace process to fail. It would also benefit those so-called "securocrats" Sinn Féin regularly accuse of seeking to destabilise the process.