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Britain rejects spy probe
19/12/2005 17:40 - (SA)
Belfast - Britain's minister responsible for governing Northern Ireland rejected appeals on Monday for a fact-finding probe into the spying scandal that wrecked the province's Catholic-Protestant administration.
Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain said a public inquiry "would not establish any new facts" and would complicate already stalled efforts to revive power-sharing, the central goal of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord.
"We could easily get diverted into inquiry after inquiry after inquiry. What we actually want to get to is political stability," Hain said in advance of separate meetings with Irish foreign minister Dermot Ahern and Mark Durkan, Northern Ireland's leader of moderate Catholic opinion.
Fact-finding probe demanded
All Northern Ireland political parties have demanded a fact-finding probe into the scandal and the central role of a former senior Sinn Fein official, Denis Donaldson.
In October 2002 police arrested and charged Donaldson and two other men with pilfering British government records inside Northern Ireland's painstakingly constructed power-sharing administration. It quickly collapsed.
Earlier this month, prosecutors dropped all charges against the three men without explanation. The surprise move fuelled Protestant accusations that Britain had cut a secret deal with Sinn Fein to keep Donaldson and others out of prison.
'Inquiries galore'
Instead, on Friday, Donaldson stunned Northern Ireland by announcing he had secretly worked for the past 20 years as a British informer within the Irish Republican Army-linked party. Sinn Fein claimed British intelligence officials used Donaldson to trigger the collapse of power sharing.
But Hain said Sinn Fein's accusation that British agents had conspired with Donaldson "to rob this office of its own information just beggars belief". And he said other inquiries into bitterly disputed episodes from Northern Ireland's past often had been wasteful.
"Frankly, we have had inquiries galore in Northern Ireland. They cost hundreds of millions of pounds. I am not going down that road when it is quite clear that it is not in the public interest to do so," he said.
- AP
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