Heroes, Villains and, or Victims?
Shrugged shoulders for a dead informer is shameful
The truth should always be told, no matter how uncomfortable. Denis Donaldson's family are entitled to the full facts
Máiría Cahill, Sunday Independent, June 8th, 2025
THE TRUTH SHOULD ALWAYS BE TOLD, NO MATTER HOW UNCOMFORABLE. DENIS DONALDON’S FAMILY ARE ENTITLED TO THE FULL FACTS.
Shortly after Gerry Adams served a writ against the BBC for their 2016 Spotlight programme about Denis Donaldson, I met the corporation's lawyers and agreed to attend court to give evidence of my experience of both men.
Since then, the spectre of the case has shadowed my life — a stressful reminder of something you know is the right thing to do, but...
Weeks ago, other commitments meant my attendance became initially insurmountable, then subsequently resolvable. Then, over Easter weekend, I was hospitalised for a health issue. Torn between wanting to help, and needing to heal, I told the BBC that I was available, but asked them to only call me if it was necessary to their case. It wasn't.
In the end, the jury ruled that Adams had been defamed by the BBC and he was awarded damages.
Outside the court, Adams said he was "very mindful” of the Donaldson family and added: "There's an onus on both governments and everyone else — and I include myself in this — to try and deal with these legacy issues as best that we can.”
Denis Donaldson's daughter, Jane, responded: "Although the plaintiff claimed sympathy for my family, his legal team objected to me giving evidence to challenge the account of his witnesses.”
In a voir dire hearing (a hearing to determine the admissibility of evidence), the judge ultimately decided.
I liked Jane's father. He once — unsuccessfully — asked me to join the IRA, while eating an Indian takeaway in his car. I worked alongside him at times, and can still see him, finger and thumb to his cigarette butt, sucking it with a whistle through his teeth, smiling and bouncing on his heels.
Like everyone else, I was stunned when he was outed as an informer in December 2005.
In Belfast, "tout” is a loaded word, laced and spat with menace. To republicans, the stigma of informing is worse than being a paedophile — which presumably explains why the IRA killed informers, yet moved around sex offenders.
Northern Ireland's secrets and its shadows can warp morality — so much so that dead informers at most elicited shrugged shoulders. It is an attitude that leaves little empathy for the families of those who gambled their own lives in high-stakes games between illegal and legal gunmen.
A squalid world
In the squalid world of state agents, human life is expendable. Look no further than the Kenova inquiry, which cost £40m, and found the handling of Stakeknife "resulted in more lives being lost than saved”.
It also found that "the republican leadership should apologise to the victims of the IRA internal security unit and the subsequent hostile treatment of their loved ones”, some of whom were murdered. They're still waiting.
Stakeknife, aka Freddie Scappaticci, was outed as an informer in 2003. He fled the North shortly after and lived as a recluse in England, still under British state protection. He died of natural causes in 2023 — to the relief of those whose secrets he was privy to.
Denis Donaldson was exposed as an agent two years after Scappaticci's unmasking, causing political uproar. Why he chose to go to Donegal is anyone's guess, though one would imagine the secrets he held were subject to an IRA internal investigation-gathering exercise — and so, for a time, he was more useful to them alive.
If the Irish State knows, it's keeping that information secret from the rest of us. Donaldson's inquest has been adjourned 27 times to facilitate a criminal investigation that, disgracefully, has now taken 19 years.
Family still denied access to his diary
A journal he was writing at the time of his death has been withheld from the family by An Garda Síochána, citing national security grounds.
"There are circumstances where delay gets to the point of being beyond the pale,” the Donaldsons' solicitor told the BBC last week.
In August 2024, Jane Donaldson wrote: "For years, letters on behalf of my family to An Taoiseach, An Tánaiste and the Minister for Justice have been ignored.”
Last Wednesday, Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan stated: "It is regrettable that to date it has not been possible to bring those responsible to court to answer for their actions,” adding that, as there is an active ongoing investigation by gardaí, it "would not be appropriate to comment further at this time”.
Ireland has plenty of platitudes for victims, yet little recourse to justice.
The British government highlighted the latter when Ireland launched a legal challenge against its proposals to introduce an amnesty for legacy cases. In March, the NI Assembly passed an Ulster Unionist Party motion criticising Ireland's failure to conduct an inquiry into the Omagh atrocity.
Victims’ hierarchy still exists
In April 2024, a coroner hearing the Kingsmill inquest remarked that there appeared to be "some reluctance on the part of the Irish State” to recognise the significance of the Border in the killings, in "facilitating the atrocity and hampering the investigation”.
Irish inertia, British indifference. Neither have the moral high ground, despite several attempts to claim it.
"A victims' hierarchy already exists. At the bottom are those who were murdered as state agents, murdered post-Good Friday Agreement, or murdered in the south of Ireland. My father's murder meets all three criteria,” Jane Donaldson also wrote in 2024.
She's right.
One month ago, senior politicians including Mary Lou McDonald stood alongside 87-year-old Bridie Brown outside Belfast's High Court as she challenged the British government's decision not to grant a public inquiry. Her husband, Sean, was murdered by loyalists 28 years ago. The Government supports the family's call. The Tánaiste met her at Government Buildings. A criminal justice investigation is still live.
All of this is commendable. The Browns should have an inquiry.
It is worth noting, though, that no Cabinet minister has met with Denis Donaldson's widow Alice, now 77, or his family, or stated they support a public inquiry into his killing.
Unravelling a Sinn Féin spy's secrets is hardly likely to shock these days — so the State's approach of saying nothing regarding Denis Donaldson and refusing an inquiry is no longer sustainable. His family deserves better.
The truth should always be told, no matter how uncomfortable, so that we — the public — can peruse the full facts to understand the bigger picture.
Otherwise, cui bono?
Jim Lynagh attacked and murdered isolated Protestants – that’s who he was
A letter from Ken Funston: Belfast News Letter, June 5th, 2025
On Easter Monday the current chairperson of Mid Ulster District Council, councillor Eugene McConnell, and Sinn Fein leader Mary McDonald, were to the front of a commemoration in memory of Jim Lynagh.
This is coming from a party who profess to be a party for all, rather than in the meaning of their name, ‘we ourselves’. It exemplifies the fact that Provisional Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA are indivisible and are in fact the same organisation.
By explanation, we need to highlight who Jim Lynagh was. He was born and raised in Monaghan town, and from an early age he became involved in PIRA acts of terrorism.
He was almost killed by his own bomb in 1973 when he was only 17 and then spent a period in prison in HMP Maze.
Upon his release he thrust himself headlong back into PIRA activities, and he was to the fore of many terrorist acts.
The North Monaghan unit, led by Patrick McKearney and Lynagh, did not limit their attacks to the local area. They were prepared to travel in order to conduct their nefarious acts, carrying out shootings and bombings in South Fermanagh, South and East Tyrone, and South-West Armagh.
Some of their most notable operations were the attack and murders of the Stronges in Tynan Abbey, 1981, and the attacks on Ballygawley, Birches and Loughgall RUC stations.
Creating ‘Free Zones’
The so-called PIRA chief of staff at that time was Kevin McKenna who advocated the creation of a ‘free zone’ that would give PIRA freedom to carry out their attacks at will.
To implement the free zone, all unionists needed to be either murdered, or living in such fear that they could not and would not react to the PIRA attacks.
All others would be forced to leave the area, thereby ethnically cleansing it of unionists.
The cleansing of the Clogher Valley was to be the first phase, and removing the security force bases was part of the strategy.
Lynagh and his side-kick McKearney were to be at the forefront to implement the plan, and took to it with gusto.
One of Lynagh’s closest friends, Seamus McElwaine, had already been pursuing the policy in Fermanagh, attacking and murdering isolated Protestants, thereby forcing unionist families out of the area.
Lynagh, from his strategic base near Newbliss, County Monaghan, carried out habitual attacks on isolated Protestants in south Fermanagh and south east Armagh, leading to the deaths of many, such as Henry Livingstone and William Morrison in the Tynan area.
It was notable that following the Morrison murder, Lynagh spent a period in prison in the South, and the number of murders in the area drastically reduced. Following his release, he assumed his previous role, and the only way to be stopped was when he met his demise in 1987 at Loughgall.
The security forces killed him and his gang after they had opened fire and exploded a bomb at the RUC station.
Kevin McKenna was consumed with rage following Loughgall, and part of his ‘revenge’ was the Enniskillen and Tullyhommon bombs. It was those two attacks and the murder of my brother that inspired me to write a book alongside my friend and colleague, Cillian McGrattan, to highlight what Lynagh, McKearney, McElwaine, McKenna and the others did to their neighbours under the guise of political idealism.
We still are struggling to recover from 30 years of terrorism, and the Sinn Fein glorification of their deeds is one of the biggest hindrances to the manna of reconciliation to which we aspire.
‘The Northern Ireland Conflict on the Margins of History, Protestant Memory on the Border’, released by Berghahn Books, is available to buy.
Even through the worst of times, the Enterprise was a symbol of normality
Sam McBride, Sunday Independent and Sunday Life, June 8th, 2025
In 1998, one of the most contentious aspects of the Good Friday Agreement was cross-border bodies.
Having himself helped pull down power-sharing in 1974 over the Council of Ireland, David Trimble was intensely nervous about how many north-south bodies there would be, how powerful they'd be and who'd control them.
Some 27 years later, those bodies have been one of the Agreement's least controversial elements. Dealing with language, waterways, food safety, trade, and EU peace funds, they're rarely in the news. From a nationalist perspective, this part of the Agreement has been a failure.
Nobody gets either excited or scared about what these bodies do because their work is so limited. That's not to say that the work of Waterways Ireland, the Food Safety Promotion Board or the Loughs Agency is unimportant. But managing shared waterways is the sort of thing which would necessarily involve transnational co-operation, even in situations where diplomatic relations were verging on a declaration of war.
The unionist fear that these bodies could become a prototype united Ireland hasn't been realised. Many unionists might feel money on these bodies is wasted, but they don't feel threatened by them. Even the most symbolically contentious — Foras na Gaeilge and the Ulster Scots Agency — have largely been uneventful.
At a recent event in Belfast, I watched those two bodies' chief executives respectfully engaging in discussion about how to improve public awareness of Irish and Ulster Scots, without presenting it as a zero-sum issue. Where the Irish language has been contentious in Northern Ireland, it's mostly been in response to the actions of activists or politicians.
Yet there's another cross-border institution which has thrived since the Agreement, even though it long predates it: The Enterprise train. The Belfast-Dublin service represents one of the earliest successful examples of significant cross-border working, having been set up two years after the Second World War.
Remarkably, a steam train in 1947 completed the journey in precisely the same time — two hours and 15 minutes — as a modern diesel-powered train today. Although nominally capable of travelling at 90mph, today's trains are constrained by factors such as the track and signalling which the operators have been incapable of resolving.
Yet while a faster train would be preferrable, revolutions in work and leisure have transformed the journey. In an age of working remotely on compact laptops, it is possible for an office worker to be every bit as productive on their journey as they'd be at work. Unlike 1947, other travellers now have instant communication with the outside world through their phone, as well as access to films or music on digital devices.
breakfast
In this context, being able to work or relax in comfort is far more important than speed and a train is far superior to either a car or bus. Buses and cars are cramped, generally don't have toilets and certainly don't facilitate the consumption of a cooked breakfast.
Last year, money from the Irish Government helped secure an hourly Enterprise service. Data from Translink, which jointly runs the Enterprise with Iarnród Éireann, show that passenger numbers have increased by almost 50% in a year.
New trains are now being procured which will be more modern and able to run on batteries or from overhead electrical cable for part of the journey in built up areas. They are expected to be in service in 2029.
Last year Ian Campbell, Translink's most senior figure involved in the Enterprise service, told me that the new trains will have a higher speed, as well as faster acceleration and deceleration, meaning that “the modelling we've done shows that we can certainly operate a sub-two-hour timetable without any infrastructure upgrades”.
As the population ages, free travel for those over 60 in Northern Ireland and over 65 in the Republic partly explain why the train is moving more people than ever back and forth between the island's two capitals.
It's simple, practical, politically uncontroversial, and positive for the environment. This isn't just about the island's two big cities; they are gateways to much of the rest of the island. As train services improve after decades of neglect, passengers can use rail to travel in comfort from Portrush, Bangor or Larne to Cork, Galway or Kilkenny.
Cross-border rail services make sense on their own merits, irrespective of one's constitutional views. Impressive rail links between Belgium and France or Germany and Poland don't mean those countries want to merge.
Nor does it simply follow that because more unionists will travel to Dublin that more unionists will become nationalists. Many unionists will view Dublin as just another interesting foreign city to visit as a tourist rather than a place for which they feel any special affection.
Likewise, there is no guarantee that someone coming to Belfast from Cork or Galway is going to necessarily feel more strongly in favour of Irish unity. They might, in fact, feel that this is a place which looks and feels quite different to the rest of the island.
Regardless, being able to experience other parts of the island first hand, rather than mediated through politicians or journalists is itself valuable. Much of what has happened in this island's history has involved ignorance of those who live in another region or have different political or religious views.
The island has changed dramatically, both north and south, since 1998. Even those who'd travelled between the two jurisdictions prior to then (and plenty of people have never crossed the border) would find drastic changes today.
There are now more than a million passengers carried on the Enterprise each year; by 2030, the ambition is to have more than two million passengers.
Where trains are improved, the public will use them. In Northern Ireland, train journeys have more than doubled over the last 20 years. Train journeys in the Republic have increased almost 30% in the same period.
Founded in the age of Brookeborough and de Valera, the Enterprise was always about practicality rather than politics. Yet this service is doing more to break down barriers between the two peoples of this island than all the Agreement's north-south bodies combined.
