Denis Donaldson - Political Career

Political Career

Donaldson had a long history of involvement in Irish republicanism. He joined the IRA in the mid-1960s while still in his teens, well before the start of the Troubles. According to his former friend, Jim Gibney, writing in the Irish News, he was a local hero in Short Strand in 1970 because he took part in the gun battle between loyalists and republicans at St. Matthew's Chapel. (See Battle of Saint Matthew's). He was a friend of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, and the two men served time together in Long Kesh for paramilitary offences in the 1970s.

In 1981 he was arrested by French authorities at the airport at Orly along with fellow IRA volunteer, William "Blue" Kelly. The duo were using false passports and Donaldson said that they were returning from a guerrilla training camp in Lebanon. At the 1983 general election, Donaldson was the Sinn Féin candidate in Belfast East.

In the late 1980s, he travelled to Lebanon again and held talks with both Lebanese Shia militias Hezbollah and Amal, in an effort to secure the freedom of the Irish hostage Brian Keenan. He also represented Sinn Féin in the United States, isolating future hard-line dissidents such as Bronx-based Irish-American attorney, Martin Galvin. Galvin later claimed that he had warned the republican leadership that he suspected Donaldson of being a British government informer.

In the early 2000s, Donaldson was appointed Sinn Féin's Northern Ireland Assembly group administrator in Parliament Buildings. In October 2002, he was arrested in a raid on the Sinn Féin offices as part of a high-profile police investigation into an alleged Irish republican spy-ring — the so-called Stormontgate affair. In December 2005, the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland dropped the spy-ring charges against Donaldson and two other men on the grounds that it would not be in the "public interest" to proceed with the case.