Death of an informer
There is more than one unanswered question about the murder of Denis Donaldson
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Parliament Buildings in Stormont, Northern Ireland, scene of Denis Donaldson’s high-profile arrest in 2002. (Robert Paul Young, CC2.0).
The former president of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams won a €100,000 libel judgment against the BBC on Friday after a Dublin jury found that the broadcaster had falsely connected him to the 2006 killing of Sinn Féin party worker and British intelligence informant Denis Donaldson.
Much of the British media acted with predictable scorn towards the verdict. Adams is widely understood to have spent many years as a senior figure in the Irish Republican Army, an organisation with a well-founded reputation for ruthlessness towards informers.1
For a long time, it was thought, not least by Adams himself, that this reputation would make it difficult for him to win a defamation claim. That may have led the BBC into a degree of complacency about a case that was always less straightforward than it looked.
The one thing one can say for sure about the death of Denis Donaldson is that he was the victim of an intelligence war that continued, and in some ways intensified, long after the shooting was supposed to have stopped. The two central protagonists, the IRA and the Special Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were both, in different ways, under pressure to leave the stage in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
A key moment in the struggle came in 2002 when the IRA broke into Castlereagh Police Station in East Belfast.
The high-profile break-in at a facility known as Room 220 – which housed the Special Branch 24 hour agent telephone desk – happened on 17 March 2002.
A number of assailants overpowered a police officer before escaping with a significant amount of extremely sensitive information.
In the wake of the raid, police advised a number of people, including former and serving police officers, that information about them was amongst the material taken from the police station.2
According to Belfast Telegraph crime correspondent Allison Morris, the raid was masterminded by a senior IRA figure, the late Bobby Storey, and netted intelligence on more informers than the IRA could ever hope to act on. Although Donaldson’s address appeared in the files, he did not initially fall under suspicion.3
It was not long, however, before Special Branch was reading the IRA’s own files in Operation Torsion, which revealed that republicans had the personal details of hundreds of prison officers, and were collecting political intelligence from the Northern Ireland Office.
According to former BBC security correspondent Brian Rowan, the operation was led by senior special branch officer Bill Lowry.
Lowry was hoping that the IRA director of intelligence - the man he believed had masterminded the earlier Castlereagh robbery - would walk into the surveillance net, but he did not. The Special Branch Officer would later claim that MI5 did not want arrests made, only the papers recovered. Lowry said he had come under ‘constant and consistent pressure’ not to take republican ‘skulls’ along with the documents.’4
Those arrests did ultimately happen on 4 October 2002, in what became known as the ‘Stormontgate’ raid.
Among those arrested by the police was a former employee at the NIO and Sinn Fein’s head of administration at Stormont, Denis Donaldson. One of the party’s offices at Parliament Buildings was also searched, but nothing incriminating was found there. It was a raid that happened in a very public way and which involved a significant number of uniformed police officers who arrived at Stormont in armoured Land Rovers. It was all captured on camera and the pictures dominated the day’s news coverage.5
Within days the Northern Ireland Executive had collapsed, as unionists reacted against the revelations of a republican spy ring. Many nationalists suspected that this was precisely the intent of the high-profile raid.
The Chief Constable later apologised for the heavy-handed nature of the search, which the Police Ombudsman found ‘could have been adequately conducted with a much smaller and less obtrusive police presence.’6
Subsequently, on 11 November, Bill Lowry met with Brian Rowan amid concerns that BBC reporting could expose Special Branch’s agent in the Stormont spy ring.7 It has sometimes been assumed that this was Donaldson, but it now appears to have been another man known by the pseudonym ‘Martin.’
Rowan’s subsequent report revealed the existence of Operation Torsion, along with a number of other details including the involvement of MI5.8
Lowry retired a few days later after himself becoming the subject of an internal police leak inquiry.9 He later alleged that the Chief Constable acted unfairly and politically in removing him from his role as Regional Intelligence Advisor, Belfast, on the instructions of the Security Service. The Police Ombudsman concluded that MI5 was not involved in the decision.10
On 8 December 2005, the Stormont spy ring prosecutions were dropped. Two days later, police delivered a threat message to Donaldson which stated that ‘members of the media believe that Denis Donaldson is an informant.’ The Donaldson family have since doubted whether this information was true but within a few days Donaldson had publicly admitted that he was a Special Branch source.11
As part of a subsequent Police Ombudsman’s investigation, ‘one former police officer was interviewed under criminal caution on suspicion of having told a journalist that Mr Donaldson was an informant. The officer denied the offence. A file was subsequently sent to the PPS, which directed that the officer should not be prosecuted.’12
Donaldson then disappeared from public view until he was tracked down to a remote cottage in Donegal by the Sunday World newspaper some months later. The Sunday World team who found him reportedly included a former Special Branch officer.13
A few weeks after the Sunday World story, Donaldson was murdered at the same cottage. The possibility of mainstream republican involvement made the killing another blow to the peace process.14
The attack was claimed by the dissident Real IRA in 2009. Their responsibility was widely doubted, but the claim is at least confirmation that anti-peace process republicans were among those who had a motive.15
In 2016, a BBC Spotlight documentary claimed that Adams had sanctioned the killing, citing an agent who said that ‘I know from my experience in the IRA that murders have to be approved by the leadership.’16 This source was ‘Martin’, the key Special Branch agent at the heart of the Stormont spy ring.17 That in itself might have called for some caution about his evidence, given that Martin’s own handlers helped to set in motion the events that led to Donaldson’s exposure.
It was Spotlight’s allegation that led, nine years later, to last Friday’s libel verdict. My own union, the NUJ, has said that the ruling has ‘profound implications for the practice of journalism.’18 There is no doubt that Sinn Féin politicians have been increasingly robust in their use of libel law in recent years, but experienced journalists have also questioned the wisdom of the BBC’s defence. The Belfast Telegraph’s political editor, Suzanne Breen, noted Martin ‘wasn’t speaking from a position of having direct knowledge of what he claimed: it was purely hearsay evidence.’19
That is not to say that everything has gone Adams’ way over the last few days. In 2016, the solicitor for Denis Donaldson’s family dismissed allegations that the mainstream IRA was involved in the killing.20 Many expected the family to restate that position during the libel case.
Instead, on Friday, Donaldson’s daughter Jane issued a statement saying ‘We supported neither side in this case. Although the plaintiff claimed sympathy for my family, his legal team objected to me giving evidence to challenge the account of his witnesses. The jury heard sensitive, privileged family information tossed around without our consent, but did not hear my testimony.’21
That statement is all the more striking given that Jane Donaldson is a sister-in-law of the current chairman of Sinn Fein, Declan Kearney. However, it is also clear that the Donaldson family retains concerns about the role of state agencies in the case.
In a submission to the British Parliament in February, Jane Donaldson questioned the official version of events leading up to Donaldson’s exposure in 2005.
The home from which my father fled in December 2005 within days of being exposed as an informer is within walking distance of where the agent Stakeknife is reputed to have lived for many years in west Belfast. While Stakeknife was safeguarded, sheltered and then shepherded away to a secure location, my father was thrown to the wolves. I would like that to be explained. I would like those State agencies and republican groups involved in such cases to publicly account for their actions.22
Although the UK Government has introduced new proposals for dealing with the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland, it has disclaimed responsibility for the Donaldson case on the grounds that the killing took place in the Republic of Ireland. For its part the Irish Government has failed to deliver an inquest in the case over almost twenty years.
The murder of Denis Donaldson is one only one of many notorious Troubles killings that had a cross-border element. In any serious legacy process, it is surely incumbent on both Governments to work together to address such cases.
One of the more authoritative early journalistic accounts of Adams’ career states that he became head of the IRA’s Army Council in 1979. Patrick Bishop & Eamonn Mallie, The Provisional IRA, Corgi Books, 1987, p.315.
Police Ombudsman rejects claims that police allowed Castlereagh raid to happen, Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, 28 September 2017.
Allison Morris, IRA raid on Castlereagh Police Station: ‘People think they know what happened, but they’ve only seen a fraction of it’, Belfast Telegraph, 12 March 2022.
Brian Rowan, The Armed Peace: Life and Death After the Ceasefires, Mainstream Publishing, 2003, revised 2004, p.21.
Rowan, The Armed Peace, p.22.
Rowan, The Armed Peace, p.24.
Brian Rowan, How Stormont Spies were rumbled, BBC News, 12 November 2002.
Rowan, The Armed Peace, p.25.
'MI5 did not influence Orde': Police Ombudsman report, Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, 9 July 2003.
Owen Bowcott and Sam Jones, In a squalid refuge, double agent's past finally catches up with him, Guardian, 5 April 2006.
Public Statement: The murder of Denis Donaldson, Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland, 11 March 2022.
Colm Heatley, Ex-RUC Man helped find Donaldson, Sunday Business Post, 9 April 2006, archived at the Internet Archive.
Agent's death 'won't stall peace’, BBC News, 5 April 2006.
Ciaran Barnes, Republicans doubt Real IRA claim over MI5 informant’s killing, 1 June 2025.
Gerry Adams 'sanctioned Denis Donaldson killing', BBC News, 21 September 2016.
Allan Preston, Slain agent 'accidentally exposed Stormontgate subterfuge', Belfast Telegraph, 21 September 2016.
Gerry Adams' BBC manners remark 'chilling', says NUJ secretary, BBC News, 1 June 2025.
Suzanne Breen, It was abundantly clear the BBC was in trouble... the jurors seemed to take to Gerry Adams, Belfast Telegraph, 1 June 2025.
Henry McDonald, Denis Donaldson's family say Provisional IRA did not kill him, The Guardian, 23 September 2016.
Sam McBride, The email sent to us at start of Gerry Adams’ trial... which we can only now print, Belfast Telegraph, 31 May 2025.
Jane Donaldson, Written evidence submitted by Jane Donaldson, relating to the Government’s new approach to addressing the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland, UK Parliament, February 2025.