The latest republican to be exposed as working for British intelligence is unlikely to be the last, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
In December 1999, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams demanded to know who planted a fairly sizeable listening device in his car. Last night he was in a position to hazard a guess.
Roy McShane, the latest republican to be exposed as a British spy, was part of the familiar Sinn Féin backdrop at Stormont and in west Belfast. He was, like Denis Donaldson, regularly around when Gerry Adams and other senior party figures were around - either at Stormont, at republican funerals, at press conferences, in the Sinn Féin offices, and very likely when Adams and Martin McGuinness were going to IRA meetings.
That was because McShane was a driver for party leaders. He would have been in a position to eavesdrop at critical times of the peace process when Adams and McGuinness would have been very anxious to conceal their negotiating hand.
A senior Sinn Féin spokesman yesterday suggested that in recent years, at least, the party suspected McShane was an informer. "He was sidelined to the point of being removed from any work." Nonetheless, while he did not have a strategic role in the party, he was physically close to those who did - and at important times in the long negotiating process that finally led to the May 8th, 2007, powersharing deal. He's been around a long time.
This will hardly be the last such revelation, which has caused quite an amount of shock in west Belfast and other republican areas. When Lord Eames and Denis Bradley and other members of the commission on the past travelled to London to examine the Stevens papers on collusion, they were said to be shocked by how deeply the IRA and Sinn Féin were infiltrated.
If MI5 could land catches such as Denis Donaldson and McShane, it follows that it is likely it netted other senior figures. It is likely that if McShane was outed, others too will be exposed, perhaps on a drip-drip basis to cause continuing embarrassment to Sinn Féin. This latest revelation should not destabilise the current regime at Stormont, but it will upset ordinary republicans, causing them to wonder what the "war" was about, was the IRA leadership really in control, who was genuine, who was a "tout". That must be uncomfortable and annoying for Adams and other leaders, but it is just something they must live with it and manage.
Republicans said McShane could return to west Belfast if he makes peace with his family and his community and that he was under no threat from the IRA. But McShane will be mindful that Denis Donaldson, in whose company he was often seen at Stormont, had similar assurances, and yet ended up gunned to death in a cottage in Donegal.