BELFAST, Dec 17: British Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing mounting pressure to launch an investigation in Northern Ireland after a former Sinn Fein leader claimed he was a spy for the British government for 20 years.

The scandal erupted on Friday when Denis Donaldson, who had just been cleared of charges of spying for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), admitted that after all he had been a spy — but for the other side.

Mr Donaldson, 55, told Irish state RTE television that for two decades he spied for the British intelligence services within the ranks of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing and the main Catholic party in Northern Ireland seeking to break away from London and unite with the Republic of Ireland.

The admission by Mr Donaldson — a respected party member who was Sinn Fein’s head of administration during the brief life of the now suspended Northern Ireland Assembly — sent shock waves across the British province and beyond.

By Saturday political leaders in Northern Ireland were calling for a public inquiry into the spying allegations, which may further complicate efforts to restart the so-called Good Friday peace accord of 1998, aimed at ending the decades of violence between Protestant and Catholic paramilitary groups.

“There must be no attempt at cover-up, the democratic right of the people to be informed must be honoured,” said Ian Paisley, hardline leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the chief loyalist and Protestant grouping.

“The only way to get to the truth is a full public inquiry, this is the very least the (British) prime minister and the Northern Ireland Secretary can do,” Ulster Unionists leader Reg Empey said.

Mr Blair has not yet officially commented on Donaldson’s confession in which he claimed that British intelligence had begun paying him in the 1980s after he had compromised himself during a “vulnerable time” in his life.

A spokesman for Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, the British government’s representative in the province, told AFP Saturday that there would be no immediate reaction to the calls for an inquiry.

Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness was a bit more sceptical about an investigation. “What would a public inquiry achieve? The unionists have asked for it, let’s see if they get one,” McGuinness told BBC Ulster radio.

“We believe that any inquiry would cover what we have said, that there was a spy ring at Stormont, a British spy ring,” McGuinness said.

McGuinness was referring to the first eruption of spying allegations in 2002.

That year Donaldson was at the centre of claims that the IRA was operating a spy-ring in parliament buildings.

After he was charged, the so-called Stormontgate affair poisoned relations in the power-sharing administration between Catholic and Protestant parties, triggering a political crisis that resulted in London suspending the executive government and resuming control of the province.—AFP