premise: In his brief statement, Donaldson said: "I was not involved in any republican spy ring in Stormont. The so-called Stormontgate affair was a scam and a fiction, it never existed, it was created by Special Branch."
  Ahern, speaking to RTE television from the European Union summit in Brussels, was nonplussed by the developments.
  "Stortmongate never made much sense to me and the dropping of the charges made less," he told RTE.
  "This is just a bizarre twist. If what we are being asked to believe is that the senior administrator in Stormont turns out to be an agent of the British security services that takes some twist of even my imagination," Ahern said.
   What caused the charges to be dropped?
hypothesis: not involved in any republican spy ring in Stormont