The rival nationalist SDLP said the "buck stopped" with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and that he must resign after Denis Donaldson, the former head of Sinn Fein's offices at the Northen Ireland assembly building, admitted he was a paid British agent for 20 years.
The SDLP's call came amid speculation among republicans that a far more senior politician in Sinn Fein is in fact the mole, and that Donaldson was being forced to take the rap to protect the party.
SDLP vice chairman Eddie Espie said: "This project of super-collusion happened under Gerry Adams' watch. Only a few days ago, Gerry Adams was happy to appear alongside Donaldson on the steps of Stormont, presenting him as a `victim of securocrats' and trying to tell everyone to move on from the Stormontgate affair," he said.
"Now it transpires that Adams was singing the praises of an arch-British agent. The buck stops with him. The only option now open is for Gerry Adams to resign," Espie said.
Republicans have been reeling since it emerged on Friday that Donaldson, Sinn Fein's former head of administration at Stormont, was working for British army and police intelligence since the mid-1980s.
Unionists have demanded a full public inquiry into the "Stormontgate" affair which began in October 2002 when allegations of an IRA spying operation at Stormont prompted suspension of the Northern Ireland assembly and three years of direct rule.
Donaldson, his son-in-law and another civil servant were charged with operating a republican spy ring.
But 10 days ago, the case was dropped when the director of prosecutions said it was not in the public interest.
Donaldson's admission that he had been spying for the British for 20 years has sent shockwaves through the republican community and stoked old fears about Northern Ireland's long and dirty intelligence war.
Donaldson, 55, whose father was an IRA member in the 1950s, was seen as an unlikely traitor to the cause. A Belfast newspaper yesterday claimed he had turned tout in the 1980s to prevent a family member from serving time in prison.
The police have maintained that the IRA was in fact gathering intelligence and unionists want British Prime Minister Tony Blair to explain why the case was mysteriously dropped. But both the government and Sinn Fein seem eager to move on from the affair.
Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness yesterday said the only spy ring which operated at Stormont was run by the British intelligence services, but he stopped short of calling for a public inquiry.
The Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Hain, defended the police operation against republicans at Stormont in 2002.
"Something like a thousand documents were stolen from the Northern Ireland Office over which I now preside. They appeared in a west Belfast situation. They disappeared. They were stolen," he said.
"The police ombudsman said the [police] have done not only what was justified but what was absolutely necessary. Then events unfolded and the prosecution felt that they could not proceed in the public interest."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema