Word: irelands
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Denis Donaldson was supposed to be a sign of changing times in Northern Ireland, not a reminder of its brutal, unforgiving past. Last December, when the IRA veteran admitted being a British agent for more than 20 years, his treachery didn't trigger the normal end for informers - a hasty, secret court-martial and a bullet in the back of the head; only five months before, the IRA had renounced violence for good, and so its political arm, Sinn Fein, promised that Donaldson would be left alone...
...killing may have been about much more than settling old scores. Donaldson was killed two days before the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, were due to launch a joint plan for reviving the faltering political process in Northern Ireland. Thanks to continuing mistrust between Protestant unionist leaders and Sinn Fein, efforts to restart the kind of coalition local government that was borne out of the 1998 Good Friday peace accords have been stalled for the past three years. And the murder of Donaldson, a convicted IRA bomber who served time in prison along with...
...Much of the current political stalemate in Northern Ireland, in fact, can be traced back to Donaldson himself. As head of Sinn Fein's administrative offices at the Northern Ireland assembly in the late 90s, Donaldson was accused by Britain of spying for the IRA, accusations which helped bring down Northern Ireland's landmark power sharing local government in 2002 amidst mutual suspicions and recrimination. Only after those charges were suddenly dropped against Donaldson and two others last December did he reveal on national TV the stunning news that he in fact had been on the British intelligence payroll...
...Blair and Ahern both suggested the murder may have been a deliberate attempt to derail their plan to finish the job of establishing a peaceful Northern Ireland. "If there are people who are trying to wreck the political process by these appalling and barbaric acts of violence," Blair said, "the single best message is to say 'No, you're not going to succeed.'" That sounds good in theory, but as Donaldson's killing has shown once again, violence usually has the final say in Northern Ireland...
...DIED. JOHN MCGAHERN, 71, Irish novelist whose early assaults on Ireland's religious and sexual hypocrisy were long shunned at home; in Dublin. After his 1965 novel The Dark was banned and he was forced out of his teaching job, McGahern moved abroad, living in England, France and the U.S. It was only after he resettled in his native Leitrim in the early 1970s that Ireland began to cherish his work, recognizing itself in his quiet portraits of a country riven by the pressures of the modern world...