TORONTO STAR:

Local video shop owner Donal MacDenis will be remembered for his work as a volunteer for the local soup kitchen and his contributions to the victims of gun crime in the city's downtown area. The former data-entry clerk, an immigrant from Ireland some years ago, died peacefully in his sleep on 4 April, at age 71.

Soon after arriving in Canada, following a brief stint with the city government as a computer operator, Mr MacDenis opened his own video shop specialising in espionage-related films.

Mr MacDenis was famously publicity-shy. His one previous appearance in the Toronto Star occurred as a result of an altercation with a photographer and reporter who were attempting to do a Christmas-season feature article on the soup kitchen at which he volunteered regularly. Mr MacDenis turned white when he realised he had been photographed, and prevailed upon the photographer to delete the image. His likeness never appeared in the newspaper.

He is survived by his loving wife Alice, their children and grandchildren.

That's the death notice that should have run . . . 15 years from now . . . after Donaldson had been warned by his MI5 handlers that exposure was imminent and he was packed off into a witness protection programme. It would have been a preferable end, to some, rather than relying on the tender mercies of his soon-to-be former colleagues in Sinn Fein and people of a more muscular disposition they might happen to bump into while shaving.

The UK doesn't have a method for disappearing people who have done their state some service that places their life in jeopardy.

At least not any as overexposed as the American FBI version mythologised by Hollywood, though it's been proposed.

But one would have to think that if it really wanted to, the British security services would have been able to set up Denis Donaldson with a new life under a new name in a quieter corner of the world.

So why didn't they? Why did Denis Donaldson spend his last days in a Famine-era cottage with no running water, foraging for firewood in the remote, rugged Donegal hills? It's a mystery worthy of the James Bondesque spy movies that Donaldson was revealed to be so fond of when observers watched the movers cart away his things from 16 Aitnamona Crescent, his old house in west Belfast.

One thing we do know is that MI5 . . . or whatever agency really ran Donaldson, but for simplicity let's assume it was MI5 . . . is going to need severe leverage indeed to recruit and retain its next mole inside the republican movement. Even people with fragile personalities (who nonetheless find themselves in positions to be helpful) who are vulnerable to being suborned into betraying their comrades would want to know that at the end there was a way out, a chance for redemption or at least quiet.

Not to be discovered in advanced rigor mortis after suffering a pariah's death, unmourned and your grave a target for desecration.

Many people will of course think it a good thing that MI5 has dealt such a mortal blow to its own credibility in this way. Which is fine as long as the punter in the al-Qaeda cell, who's just been caught in a compromising position with a bird flu-infected swan by an MI5er trying to turn him before his pals blow up Heathrow, doesn't read the newspapers.

So what did happen?

Perhaps Donaldson crossed them and they didn't think through the consequences.

Perhaps they and not some republican true believers were ultimately the ones who pulled the trigger.

I suspect Donaldson saw himself as more of a John le Carre anti-hero than a venal James Bond villain. He knew a newspaper had found him, that he could be found by others. And so he waited patiently at this cottage in Donegal for his assassin.

Suicide by failure to hide.

Penance for his betrayal and a final revenge on both his former employers.

Something, in its way, noble at the end of an ignoble two decades.

And it makes a better obituary than dying in your bed in Toronto.