When he wasn’t driving Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to secret meetings, Roy “The Rat” McShane liked to relax over a round of golf or a pint of stout at The Felons Club in West Belfast. But the veteran IRA man had another activity that yesterday cost him his relaxed, family lifestyle and forced him to flee into “protective custody”.

The Rat, as his comrades jokingly called him, was an informer in the pay of MI5.

Sinn Fein was reeling last night from another spy scandal after the driver who worked closely with the Republican leadership fled Northern Ireland, apparently under the protection of his security service handlers.

Roy McShane, 58, was once part of the so-called security team of the leadership of the Republican movement, which looked after transport arrangements to numerous secret meetings where Provisional IRA top brass were hammering out its peace process strategy.

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The news was broken yesterday afternoon by Sinn Fein, which admitted that he had been working for the intelligence services. The party said that Mr McShane had left his home in West Belfast early yesterday.

Police refused to comment on the disclosure, which will be deeply embarrassing for Mr Adams, the Sinn Fein president, after the sensational disclosure two years ago that one of his closest aides also worked for MI5.

Denis Donaldson, 56, who headed Sinn Fein’s support team at Stormont, was later shot dead near Glenties in Co Donegal. Donaldson served a sentence for an IRA bombing and later was instrumental in the Republican movement’s contacts with Middle Eastern groups.

Mr McShane, a former IRA man from the Clonard area of Belfast was a long-term driver for senior republicans, including around the time of the developing peace process that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement ten years ago.

Even though he would have been considered no more than a rank-and-file republican — he was described yesterday by former associates as a “working-class foot-soldier” — he would have been privy to highly sensitive information.

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