Analysis: Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor, examines the conflicting theories on the Donaldson affair
The exposure of Denis Donaldson as a British agent is deeply embarrassing for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Sinn Féin and IRA people used to taunt that dissident republicans such as the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA were never going to get off the starting blocks as paramilitary organisations because they were so "riddled with informers".
There was a certain truth in that claim but now it emerges that Mr Donaldson, one of the most senior of Mr Adams's backroom team, was a British operator. This after central IRA figure Freddie Scappaticci was "outed" as having been turned by the British. And there is talk of other highly placed traitors to the cause in danger of exposure. That must shake the confidence of the republican faithful.
At the weekend Mr McGuinness was sent out to stiffen the republican backbone and engage in a battle of damage limitation. There was no republican spy ring at Stormont, he asserted. If there were dirty tricks at Stormont the British securocrats were behind it, not Sinn Féin or the IRA. It was a plot.
A senior Sinn Féin source spent considerable time at the weekend providing additional background to The Irish Times on what republicans say Stormontgate was really about. Security and political sources also spent time attempting to refute the republican conspiracy theory. Who to believe? Let's examine the theories.
In a nutshell the Sinn Féin man argued that an inner circle of senior PSNI Special Branch, MI5 and Northern Ireland Office (NIO) officials acting outside the knowledge or authority of PSNI chief constable Hugh Orde, Tony Blair or Northern Secretary Peter Hain were behind Stormontgate.
"Centrally these are spooks and spies who can't accept that they did not defeat the IRA," he said. First of all he contended that these figures were behind the heavy-handed spy ring raid on Stormont in October 2002 which led to the collapse of the Northern Executive and Assembly.
Now they were up to their old tricks again with the exposure of Denis Donaldson as an agent. He said that uniformed PSNI officers called to Mr Donaldson's west Belfast home last Saturday week to inform him that he was about to be revealed as an agent and that it was time he was spirited away for his own and his family's safety.
This was deliberately done so that Mr Donaldson would be in an absolute bind: police officers at his door meant the republican bush telegraph disclosing he was an agent; therefore he had no option but to flee. In this case, however, Mr Donaldson decided to stay and admit his involvement to Sinn Féin, which capsized the "securocrat" plan. Or so the argument goes.
The Sinn Féin source said: "This is all happening at a time when the security minister Shaun Woodward is giving the IRA a clean bill of health [ he told The Irish Times last week the IRA was not involved in paramilitary activity or organised crime] and when the next report from the Independent Monitoring Commission in January is expected to do the same. But if Denis Donaldson was forced to leave what will the report say? That people are in danger from the IRA, that they are engaged in high-level espionage, that they are still active."
This in turn would scupper the prospects of the DUP and Sinn Féin coming to an eventual agreement to restore devolution, and give Ian Paisley an excuse not to engage in negotiations with Sinn Féin. The source said Sinn Féin accepted that Mr Blair, Mr Hain and Mr Orde were not party to this alleged plot.
He also argued that while some people might find this rather far-fetched, there were semi-autonomous elements - particularly in Special Branch and MI5 - who would do anything to damage Sinn Féin and the IRA, even if it meant destroying the prospects of a political deal at the same time.
"And there was no spy ring," he added.
But how does this square with thousands of Stormont documents being uncovered during the October 2002 investigations and the security of hundreds of prison officers and others being compromised as a result of their detection?
His answer was that nothing incriminating was found in the Sinn Féin Stormont offices in 2002 and that all the documentation uncovered was in the west Belfast control of Mr Donaldson. Therefore as the documents were funnelled through Mr Donaldson this meant he was acting as a form of agent provocateur at Stormont to convey the impression of an IRA spy operation.
So, does that work? No, said the security types at the weekend. One acknowledged that three years ago Mr Orde agreed that there were people in his own force who wanted him to fail, but that since then those officers were rooted out of the PSNI or neutralised. There was no longer a force within a force.
They all insisted that an IRA spy ring was operated at Stormont and that more than Mr Donaldson were involved. "If he were an agent provocateur, wouldn't it have made more sense that the documents were found in the Sinn Féin offices at Stormont rather than in Donaldson's home?" said one source.
The contacts also insisted, as reported on Saturday, that Mr Donaldson was not the IRA mole who alerted the British to the alleged spy ring in 2002: that it was another British agent in the IRA who tipped them off. They said while Mr Donaldson had provided useful information to his handlers, he baulked at revealing the spying operation because he either felt to do so would make the IRA suspicious of him or because he did not want to incriminate others involved in the Stormont intelligence-gathering.
They said the argument that Mr Donaldson all alone created the "fiction" of an IRA spying operation just wasn't credible, and that his assertions to this effect were part of the price he had to pay to the IRA and Sinn Féin for his own security. They added that the Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan accepted that the Stormont 2002 raids were justified.
Republicans will believe the Sinn Féin scenario; unionists won't: the rest of us will have to decide for ourselves which is the most credible.
A Government insider, peering through all this smoke, admitted his continuing confusion but found something sensible, positive and - oddly in this case - perfectly understandable to say: "Well, at least Denis Donaldson is alive; he's not lying tied up and naked along some lonely Border road somewhere."
The point the Dublin source was making was that these are changed times: that in a sense this is history or the natural dirty outworkings of the Troubles: nobody's dead as they would have been not so many years ago: so let's move on and deal with real politics.