Stormontgate is the name given to the controversy surrounding an alleged Provisional Irish Republican Army spy ring and intelligence-gathering operation based in Stormont, the parliament building of Northern Ireland. The term was coined in October 2002 after the arrest of Sinn Féin's Northern Ireland Assembly group administrator Denis Donaldson, his son-in-law Ciarán Kearney, and former porter William Mackessy for intelligence-gathering on 4 October 2002. Immediate repercussions Ten days after the arrests, devolved government in Northern Ireland collapsed. The raid involved "scores" of Police Service of Northern Ireland officers who entered the building to remove two computer disks from the Sinn Féin offices. Thousands of documents were reportedly discovered by the police in Donaldson's Belfast home. Charges dropped On 8 December 2005 the charges against all three men were dropped by the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service. Lawyers for the service said that "the prosecution for the offences in relation to the accused are no longer in the public interest". Sinn Féin claimed that the prosecutions had been politically motivated and were dropped because of lack of evidence. Some unionists suggested that dropping the charges was a "reward" for the final act of decommissioning by the Provisional IRA announced on 26 September 2005. British agent On 16 December 2005, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams announced to a press conference in Dublin that Donaldson had been a spy in the pay of MI5 for over twenty years. This was confirmed by Donaldson in a statement to broadcast media outlet RTÉ shortly afterwards. In his statement Donaldson described the alleged Sinn Féin spy ring in Stormont as "a scam and a fiction". Adams has asserted that both the planned leaking of Donaldson's name as an informer and the original Stormontgate allegations were engineered by the security forces to discredit Sinn Féin and cause a crisis in the peace process. The affair had been investigated by Nuala O'Loan, the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman, who ruled that the raid was not politically motivated. O'Loan found that the "decision to seek a warrant authorising a search of a specific desk in the Sinn Féin offices was reasonable, proportionate and legal" but was critical of the number of vehicles used and the scale of the police operation. Normally the Ombudsman's office is given access to all relevant codenames and reports relating to informants. O'Loan was unaware that Donaldson was an informant. Following the public unmasking of Donaldson,