There is a wee second hand bookshop not too far from Daniel O’Donnell’s home place of Kincasslagh where if you go in you’ll find a very pleasant woman with a strange accent – I have never been able to place where she’s from – who plays haunting classical music.
If I’m in the area I’ll usually stop off as it’s a lovely, relaxing way to spend 15 or 20 minutes.
The last time I was there I was browsing when I came across a book, Thatcher’s Spy, written by Willie Carlin where the front page blob states it is a story about “my life as an MI5 agent inside Sinn Fein”.
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It was a real surprise, genuinely so, for me to come across this book. I knew Willie Carlin really well. I didn’t know he had written a book about his life.
Back in the 1980s when Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin etc would come down to the Derry Journal office they would be in casual clothes and blend in with the crowd but Willie, then a leading member of the party in the Waterside area, would arrive in what I used to call a Des O’Connor blazer, with three big shiny silver ‘bicycle wheel’ buttons on the front, a polo neck sweater, his hair combed and looking as he was heading out for lunch at the golf club.
I clearly remember thinking at the time there was something about him that didn’t add up. As it turned out, there was a hell of a lot about him that didn’t add up. He was a cuckoo in the Sinn Fein nest.
In his book he tells of joining the British army as a young man. With 80% unemployment in some areas of Derry this was seen by many as a way out to a better life.
It’s too long to go into the detail but the short version of his recruitment as an informer is that as he was about to leave the army in the mid 1970’s he was introduced by his commanding officer to a ‘spook’ from MI5 who persuaded him when he returned home to Derry he should join Sinn Fein and report on their political activities. Willie was to spend the next 12 years reporting back to his handlers.
During those years he had to watch his back for fear of being outed. It’s clear too he was conflicted in that he hated the RUC, agreed with quite a lot of what Sinn Fein was up to politically yet he carried on. It was a strange way to live.
He was eventually outed in 1985 not by a suspicious republican but, unbelievably, one of his former handlers.
He had to flee his home within hours, taking his very reluctant wife and children with him. Life in witness protection took its toll, his marriage eventually broke up, his mother and sister died in quick succession, and his two children, long gone from him, died in tragic circumstances. He couldn’t go to any of their funerals.
I don’t know how much of what he states in his book is true – Willie isn’t shy about bigging up his role - but as I read the book the image of the wee man who used to come into my office frequently came to mind.
I wondered what was his real motivation, and I wondered does he still think the price paid was worth it?
I also, of course, realised I didn’t know the real Willie Carlin at all.
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