McGuinness is not a British spy, insists Ahern

TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern yesterday dismissed claims that Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness was a British spy.

Mr Ahern insisted the allegations made by a former British army intelligence officer, code-named Martin Ingram, carried in a Sunday newspaper, could not be believed and suggested they may have been designed to damage the peace process.

“A lot of things, I believe, but I wouldn’t believe that. I’d find that just impossible,” Mr Ahern said.

“I suppose it’s put out to do a bit of damage, but I wouldn’t believe them,” he added.

Mr Ingram identified Belfast republican Freddie Scappaticci as the prized British agent, Stakeknife, within the IRA two years ago. Mr Scappaticci denied the allegation before fleeing his home in the west of the city.

The allegation about Mr McGuinness follows the unmasking last year of Sinn Féin’s former head of administration at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, as a spy.

He was gunned down in April at a remote cottage in Glenties, Co Donegal, after details of where he was laying low emerged.

Sinn Féin has angrily dismissed claims that Mr McGuinness, who admitted in May 2001 in a submission to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry that he was the IRA’s second-in-command in Derry in 1971, worked for MI6 during the 1990s.

A party spokesman also rejected claims that the allegation was supported by documentary evidence.

Mr McGuinness was Education Minister in the last Stormont Executive and only last week was nominated by his party leader Gerry Adams to be the next Deputy First Minister.

Mr Adams’s bid to have Mr McGuinness serve alongside the Reverend Ian Paisley in the next executive was dashed when the Democratic Unionist Party leader dismissed the offer to be First Minister in the Assembly.

Mr McGuinness and Mr Adams have driven Sinn Féin’s peace process strategy and played a key role in securing the 1994 and 1997 IRA ceasefires, the paramilitary group’s disarmament and also its announcement last July that its armed campaign was over.

Mr McGuinness has been MP for Mid Ulster since the 1997 general election and is regarded as an iconic figure in Irish republicanism.

However, unionists, particularly Mr Paisley’s DUP, regard him with animosity.

There were claims in the wake of the exposure of Mr Donaldson that other senior Sinn Féin members and republicans would be identified as British spies.