Denis Donaldson

Denis Donaldson
Denis Donaldson, early 2000s
Born	1950 Belfast, Northern Ireland
Died	4 April 2006 Glenties, County Donegal, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Known for	Sinn Féin informer
Notable work	Friends of Sinn Féin

Denis Martin Donaldson (1950 – 4 April 2006) was a volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and a member of Sinn Féin who was murdered following his exposure in December 2005 as an informer in the employ of MI5 and the Special Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary). It was initially believed that the Provisional IRA were responsible for his killing although the Real IRA claimed responsibility for his murder almost three years later.

His friendship with the French writer and journalist Sorj Chalandon inspired two novels: My Traitor, published in 2008, and Return to Killybegs, published in 2011.

Donaldson had a long history of involvement in Irish republicanism. He joined the Irish Republican Army 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 Ulster loyalists and Irish nationalists 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. Donaldson has been accused, by an unnamed republican source, of being part of the IRA team that carried out the La Mon restaurant bombing in 1978, one of the most notorious bomb attacks of the Troubles.