Double Ought Dead

Denis Donaldson, who was brutally murdered on Tuesday aged 56, was, variously, an IRA volunteer, a republican hunger striker and a central figure in Sinn Fein's "international department" before becoming its senior administrator at Stormont; he was also a British double agent for more than 20 years.
His exposure came as a shattering surprise because of his impeccable republican credentials as a "pre-69er" - someone who, like Ger Adams, had joined the movement before "the Troubles."
Donaldson's career started to unravel with his arrest in 2002. The police accused him of being a key figure in a Sinn Fein spy ring at Stormont, an event which led to the fall of both the power-sharing executive and David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader.
Three years later the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that going ahead with a court case was "no longer in the public interest", and soon after Donaldson learned that he was to be exposed. But instead of agreeing to be spirited abroad by the security services, he appeared on RTE television in Dublin, explaining that he had been recruited "after compromising myself during a vulnerable time of my life". This may have been a reference to his taste for the ladies; he was known as "a chaser", in Belfast parlance.
Even that experienced watcher of events north of the border, Bertie Ahern, admitted that the confession was "as bizarre as it gets".
Denis Martyn Donaldson was born in 1950 into a republican family in the Catholic Short Strand enclave of east Belfast. He earned a place in the republican hierarchy for his role in the so-called "Battle of St Matthews" of June 1970, a street protest against local Protestants which was regarded as one of the IRA's seminal moments. Next he was imprisoned for four years for his exertions as a "shop-lifter", his droll way of describing his blowing up of shops with explosives.
In the Maze prison he took part in the hunger strike that secured "political status" for IRA prisoners, and was photographed there with Bobby Sands, who later starved himself to death.
Donaldson earned a shout in Ger Adams's memoir, Dope and History, as a man "with ideas and energy." But apart from a losing attempt to be elected a Sinn Fein local councillor in 1983, he remained behind the scenes, with a reputation for getting things done.
It was in the early 1980s that he started to work for the British, providing them with the IRA's foreign contacts. As a member of Sinn Fein's "international department" he was arrested at Orly when returning on a false passport from Lebanon in 1981. After the authorities released him he established himself as a "quasi-ambassasdor" to the PLO and the Basque group Eta.
As head of Sinn Fein's admin. team at the Northern Irish Assembly from 1998 he seemed a conventional republican. Nothing in his conversation suggested that his antipathy for the British was an act.
His death came just before the Irish news magazine Magill was to name him its "survivor of the year".

While shut, the Stormont building has cost more than 78 million pounds ($137 million) to maintain, with patrolling security guards, cleaners, chefs and salaries for inactive deputies.
"The government wastes money hand over fist,'' said Hazel McCall, 77, a retired bank manager, walking up the mile-long hill towards the building. "It's a laugh to other countries. You've a government and there's nobody sitting there.''