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And that, more or less, is all that we know about Denis Donaldson the spy. Why had he turned, how had he been turned? For how long had he worked for the British and what did he tell them? Which section of British intelligence did he work for and how much of all this did he tell his IRA interrogators? And what was it like to be Denis Donaldson in December 2005, exposed for all the world to see as a living lie? Lots of questions, but no answers.

French journalist Sorj Chalandon has gone where too many Irish writers fear to tread these days, on an expedition into the darker waters of the Troubles. A friend-cum-journalistic contact of Donaldson whom he met over the years of covering the story in Belfast for French media, Chalandon has created a fictional version of Denis Donaldson, a much older and in key ways different man than Donaldson, whom he calls Tyrone Meehan.

While Donaldson’s IRA life began in the sectarian cockpit of east Belfast in 1970, Meehan’s starts in Donegal from where he moves to Belfast as a youngster. There he gets caught up in the city’s sectarian strife and joins the IRA. Meehan is in his eighties when he returns to Donegal to meet his maker, nearly thirty years older than Donaldson, and that enables Chalandon to take the reader on a tour of all those Stations of the Cross that mark the journey to the genesis of the Provisional IRA, events that happened before Donaldson’s birth or while he was still very young – from the hanging of Tom Williams in 1942 to the burning of Bombay Street in August 1969.

So this is not an exact replica of Denis Donaldson’s voyage through life, more a skeleton upon whose bones Chalandon has hung some of Donaldson’s real-life experiences and invented others and then travelled inside the ill-fated IRA man’s head to try to answer some of those fascinating questions.

I must confess I came to this book in an unsympathetic frame of mind. I didn’t know Denis Donaldson as well as Chalandon evidently did, but what I did know, I didn’t like. I couldn’t see how anyone could make Donaldson a character worthy of sympathy. The last time I met him was at Drumcree in July 1997 when the Orangemen were allowed to march on the Garvaghy Road to the fury of local nationalists. Donaldson was there to keep an eye on things for the IRA leadership, which had just secretly decided on a second ceasefire and was clearly worried how this might go down with the foot soldiers. As the Orangemen marched through and the police batoned the nationalists into their ghetto, the crowd chanted, ‘No more ceasefires!’ But all I remember of Donaldson is him pestering me to drive over to the Orange camp to buy up Loyalist trinkets that he could sell to his Provo friends in Belfast at a handsome profit. A guy with an eye on the main chance, cynical, self-serving. Arthur Daley meets the IRA.

However, I came away from Sorj Chalandon’s book in a more satisfied mood, although I still don’t like Denis Donaldson. And I say that because Chalandon has managed to get inside the mind of an informer, to lay bare motives, rationalizations, lies and above all else fears that must daily live with such a person. And he reconstructs Donaldson’s mysterious entrée to a life of treachery using a very plausible real-life event as the gateway, which I won’t spoil for the reader by detailing. I don’t know if this was how Donaldson became an agent but it could well have been.

Denis Donaldson may be the model for this story but it is, at the end, a tale about all informers and that is its value. Such people helped shape recent Irish history as much as anyone. But it took a Frenchman to go where Irish writers will not. What a shame.

Ed Moloney

New York, January 2013

First published 2011 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris

Published in 2013 by

The Lilliput Press

62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill

Dublin 7, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright © Sorj Chalandon, 2013

PRINT ISBN 978 1 84351 320 9

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84351 404 6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

be reproduced in any form or by any means

without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record for this title is available

from The British Library.