Over the past few months I've found increasing empathy with Denis Donaldson. See Denis Donaldson and the "Brexit Backstop". The personal story is fairly plain: Donaldson took some extreme personal risks and his only motivation could have been to do whatever he could to try to make an otherwise impossible situation bearable for everyone involved. But the people around him were so fearful of the imagined consequences that none of them could do anything to help him, and that seems to have sealed his fate.
Here is a BBC Spotlight programme made a few weeks before Donaldson was found dead with multiple shotgun wounds in an isolated cottage in Donegal, Ireland.
Here is some footage secretly filmed by an ex RUC security contractor, at the time the first press contact with Donaldson after his public admission that for twenty years he had been an informer witin Sinn Féin, working for British intelligence MI5. Donaldson had worked very closely with Gerry Adams at Stormont. Listen to the discussion about Donaldson and Adams' relationship at the time.
Now listen to Gerry Adams' immediate reaction on hearing that Denis Donaldson had been killed. Does Adams sound like he gives a fuck? I don't think so.
This is a followup BBC Spotlight programme, made after the killing of Denis Donaldson. Note at 14 mins 53 secs, that the Spotlight team had also visited the cottage after Donaldson's whereabouts had become known, and they had left a business card and said that they would like to interview him. He refused. This was only a few days before Donaldson was killed.
At 23 mins 59 secs. Graffiti. "Agents beware! Paid, betrayed, slayed by MI5/Special Branch".
As of March this year, thirteen years after the killing, the inquest into Donaldson's death had been adjourned 20 times. See this piece in Irish Times:
Here is a BBC Spotlight programme made a few weeks before Donaldson was found dead with multiple shotgun wounds in an isolated cottage in Donegal, Ireland.
Here is some footage secretly filmed by an ex RUC security contractor, at the time the first press contact with Donaldson after his public admission that for twenty years he had been an informer witin Sinn Féin, working for British intelligence MI5. Donaldson had worked very closely with Gerry Adams at Stormont. Listen to the discussion about Donaldson and Adams' relationship at the time.
Now listen to Gerry Adams' immediate reaction on hearing that Denis Donaldson had been killed. Does Adams sound like he gives a fuck? I don't think so.
This is a followup BBC Spotlight programme, made after the killing of Denis Donaldson. Note at 14 mins 53 secs, that the Spotlight team had also visited the cottage after Donaldson's whereabouts had become known, and they had left a business card and said that they would like to interview him. He refused. This was only a few days before Donaldson was killed.
At 23 mins 59 secs. Graffiti. "Agents beware! Paid, betrayed, slayed by MI5/Special Branch".
As of March this year, thirteen years after the killing, the inquest into Donaldson's death had been adjourned 20 times. See this piece in Irish Times:
An inquest into Mr Donaldson’s death was adjourned for the 20th time on Wednesday at Letterkenny Coroner’s Court.
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