A presumption of payback in turncoat's slaying

Seven years ago, when they found the body of IRA apostate Eamon Collins on a quiet road near his home in Northern Ireland, his face was so mangled that the police thought he had been run over by a farming machine.

But it was merely the product of a fury, unleashed by bare hands, reserved for touts, as informers are called in Ireland.

Publicly, officials in Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political wing, condemned Collins's murder. But a couple of years later, as he stood in the ornate halls of Stormont, the Northern Ireland assembly building where he ran Sinn Fein's office, Denis Donaldson shrugged as he and a Globe reporter discussed what happened to Collins.

''He knew the rules," said Donaldson, a dapper and diminutive former IRA commander.

The rules were: If you touted, you died.

Donaldson apparently presumed the rules had changed. After he admitted last December that he had been a spy for the British for more than 20 years, he told others that he thought he was safe in self-imposed exile, just over the border in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. But for all the talk of the Troubles being over, some rules in Ireland do not change, either by fiat or referendum.

The idea that the gun had been taken out of Irish politics may have died Tuesday with Donaldson in a remote, ramshackle cottage in the Blue Stack Mountains, where police found him, dead from a gunshot blast.

Even if his killer or killers didn't want it to, Donaldson's death will have political ramifications. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, are scheduled to meet today to figure out a way to restore the power-sharing assembly that was suspended in 2002 after Donaldson and two other men were charged with spying for the IRA at Stormont. Those charges were dismissed last year, but the scandal took a bizarre twist when Donaldson admitted he had been spying -- not for the IRA but for British intelligence.

Already reluctant to share power with Sinn Fein, the Democratic Unionists led by the fundamentalist Protestant preacher Rev. Ian Paisley immediately cited Donaldson's killing as evidence that the IRA is still engaged in violence, despite the IRA having said last July that its armed campaign was over and having destroyed its hidden arsenal a few months later.

Within an hour of Donaldson's body being found, the IRA issued a statement saying it did not kill him. As he did when Collins was killed in 1999, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams condemned Donaldson's killing and said he does not believe the IRA was involved.

As a member of the IRA, Collins admitted he was involved in the murders of at least five people, but after he wrote a book in 1997 renouncing his life in the IRA and portraying some of his erstwhile comrades as venal sociopaths instead of noble revolutionaries, many thought his days were numbered.

Before the IRA announced a cease-fire in 1994, it routinely admitted killing people it said it had found guilty of informing, dumping their bodies, heads hooded, arms tied, in the countryside. With the peace process in full swing, no one claimed responsibility for Collins's killing. But, as people in Northern Ireland say, even the dogs in the street knew it was Collins's former comrades who killed him. In the wake of Donaldson's death, it appears there is similar sentiment.

In an interview, Anthony McIntyre, who spent 18 years in prison for IRA activity and is critical of Sinn Fein's political strategy, said he does not believe the IRA ordered Donaldson's killing. He said Donaldson was most likely killed by someone who held him responsible for the deaths or imprisonment of IRA members.

''I don't see how the Provos benefit from it," McIntyre said, using the nickname for the IRA. But ''that doesn't mean a Provo didn't do it."

Michael McDowell, Ireland's justice minister, said that in narrowing down the suspects in Donaldson's killing, police are trying to assess who would gain from it. Many analysts agree that those who oppose the peace process would gain most; the killing could stall political progress by raising questions about the IRA's pledges, or giving an excuse for those who don't want to share power with Sinn Fein. Some point the finger at dissident republicans, who oppose the compromises Sinn Fein has made for political power.

Others suggest that British intelligence had as much reason to silence Donaldson as IRA members had to avenge his betrayal. But former IRA prisoner McIntyre discounted that theory, saying: ''I think The Brits would have done it much less obviously. Denis would have got the measles."

Donaldson told a Dublin newspaper he had been assured he had nothing to fear. He eked out a hermit-like existence in a cottage without electricity or running water, in a part of Ireland where so many IRA members have vacation homes that it is jokingly known as ''Costa del Provo."

McIntyre and others suggest that potential suspects include men loyal to the reputed IRA chief of staff, Thomas ''Slab" Murphy, whose farm was raided last month by police who say they are building a racketeering case against Murphy.

Donaldson's killing, meanwhile, will be especially noted by others who betrayed the IRA and fled Ireland, such as Sean O'Callaghan, the former head of the IRA's southern command, who lives in England, and Freddie Scappaticci, who allegedly led an IRA internal discipline, or ''nutting," squad, and now lives in Italy.

The war may be over in Ireland, but Donaldson's killing suggests the score- settling is not.