Some fairly obvious points need to be made about the killing of Denis Donaldson.

The first is that nothing happens in West Belfast without the knowledge and often the approval of the Provos. The idea that a senior and well known figure like Denis Donaldson could be killed by a small dissident republican group without the foreknowledge of the Provisional IRA is just plainly ludicrous.

In fact it is not stretching reality to suspect that this was an arrangement that suited both the killers and the Provos, the former because in their world they looked smart while the latter got rid of an embarrassing and possibly damaging leak. The real losers were Donaldson’s handlers, either the PSNI Special Branch or the British Army.

And make no mistake about this. Whoever pulled the trigger on Donaldson the real killers, the people who gave the go-ahead were the Provos