Tomás Ó Flatharta

In his final public sighting as DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was at Stormont for a Christian Easter service.
It was Wednesday evening and there was a feel-good sense in Parliament Buildings. The DUP and Sinn Fein had been working together harmoniously for eight weeks, and now politicians were coming together for an uplifting ecumenical concert.
With Donaldson in the audience, prayers were said for political leaders, and at the end the relaxed DUP leader went to have his photo taken with Eurovision winner Dana, who was singing at the event.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP and his wife Eleanor are scheduled to appear in court on April 24 in connection with serious criminal charges (described below). In the next weeks and months we will see how this story unfolds. The context is important – what effect will this have on the the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) which Mr Donaldson led until Good Friday 2024?

In a context where extreme right forces are on the march in most parts of the world, it is useful to add some Irish cross-border detail to Jeffrey Donaldson’s “final public sighting as DUP leader”. Sir Jeffrey was pleased to pose for a photo with Eurovision winner Dana (Rosemary Scallon) who attempted (and failed) to revive the religious far-right in the 26 County bit of Ireland. In the late 1990’s Scallon had some brief electoral success in a Presidential election, and won a European Parliament seat. However by 2011 Scallon’s political green-devil comet crashed and burned. The extremist Catholic far-right had become deeply unpopular. Most people in Ireland had turned against the Catholic Church, deeply implicated in a succession of child abuse scandals and hatred of pro-feminist causes such as the legalisation of abortion , divorce, same-sex marriage, contraception and gay rights. Shrewder right -wing politicians such as Fine Gael Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny saw the writing on the wall ; In the Dáil (parliament) this leader of the Dublin government stated that the Vatican was responsible for the “torture” of Irish children.

On 20 July 2011 Taoiseach Enda Kenny criticised the Vatican, deploring “the dysfunction, disconnection and elitism that dominates the culture of the Vatican to this day” The Vatican reacted “to evidence of humiliation and betrayal … with the gimlet eye of a Canon lawyer[, a] calculated, withering position.”^{[14][15][16][17]} He also told the Dáil that “the historic relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation.”

Enda Kenny, Vatican torture of Irish children

This objective summary of Scallon’s politics is straight from the DUP playbook :

She campaigned on family values and her strong anti-abortion beliefs. Scallon is opposed to abortion in all cases, In 2013 she said “there is no legal or constitutional obligation for politicians to legislate for the deliberate killing of an unborn child and there is no medical evidence to support this radical change to how we treat our mothers and their children and the taking of an innocent and defenceless human life can never be justified”. She was also vocal for her opposition to divorce and same sex marriage, along with a Eurosceptic line on the EU

Far-Right politics of Dana, Rosemary Scallon

Belfast journalist Sam McBride is a forensic observer of the DUP; his article in the March 31 2024 edition of the Belfast Telegraph shines a fascinating light on a strange political beast.

John Meehan April 3 2024

Recommended reading :

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In his final public sighting as DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was at Stormont for a Christian Easter service.

It was Wednesday evening and there was a feel-good sense in Parliament Buildings. The DUP and Sinn Fein had been working together harmoniously for eight weeks, and now politicians were coming together for an uplifting ecumenical concert.

With Donaldson in the audience, prayers were said for political leaders, and at the end the relaxed DUP leader went to have his photo taken with Eurovision winner Dana, who was singing at the event.

Hours later, one of Northern Ireland’s most powerful men would be wakened from his bed by detectives in a dawn raid, and would spend the rest of that day in Antrim Custody Suite — the same 20-cell facility to which Gerry Adams was taken a decade ago for questioning about the murder of Jean McConville.

After 14 hours, Donaldson had been charged with multiple serious sexual offences, and his wife Lady Eleanor (57) had been charged with aiding and abetting additional offences before both were released.

Within two hours, the DUP leader’s social media accounts vanished. Even his personal website went offline. At the same time, reports emerged that a 61-year-old man from Co Down had been charged with serious sexual offences.

Rampant speculation linked the two, yet inside the DUP many people still knew nothing about the true position.

At 1pm on Friday, a DUP statement announced that Donaldson’s time as leader was up because he’d been charged with “allegations of a historical nature”.

The party officers suspended him from the party, and put his deputy, Gavin Robinson, in as interim leader.

This was Northern Ireland’s GUBU moment: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented. Northern Ireland is convulsed with speculation about what has happened. Donaldson denies the allegations against him, and it will be for a court to decide whether or not he is guilty.

But regardless of the legal outcome, this situation is unparalleled in Northern Irish history. Political leaders have been abruptly dumped here before, some in outlandish circumstances. There have been leaders stabbed in the back or stabbed in the front by their colleagues, but this is something of a different order of magnitude.

The sense of shock is absolute. Whatever one’s view of Donaldson or the DUP, this came from nowhere. Often there are whispers about a scandal which politicians and journalists pick up long before a story breaks; with this, there was nothing. For many people, the shock is amplified by the deep religiosity of the DUP in general and Donaldson in particular.

Piety and politics have been entwined in the DUP ever since Ian Paisley’s party grew out of the Protestant Unionist Party. Not all its members are religious, but all its members know that it is a religious party. Peter Robinson, who was there for the ‘Save Ulster From Sodomy’ campaign and other religious crusades, maintained the party’s stance while carefully rebranding.

On her first day as his successor, Arlene Foster told me that the party would continue to have “very strong Christian values”.

When Edwin Poots replaced her, he was even more committed to the fusing of God and government. And when he was replaced after 21 chaotic days, it was by Donaldson, a man who wore the Christian fish symbol on his lapel right up until the end, at that concert last Wednesday night.

There has long been a contradiction in how many DUP members view the ups and downs of political life — of which this is the greatest down in its 52-year history.

Clifford Smyth, a DUP member who was close to Ian Paisley in the 1970s before falling foul of him and being expelled, later observed: “Every election victory is interpreted… as a special sign of God’s blessing upon a party which seeks to magnify His name and uphold the cause of Protestant Ulster.

“Electoral reverses suffered by DUP candidates have never prompted the opposite reaction amongst the more spiritually-minded party activists: that the rejection of the candidate should be adjudged as the disapproval of the Almighty.”

And yet, the unique circumstances here mean that some of the DUP’s shrinking but still highly influential band of religiously-zealous members are likely to see the events of last week as evidence of divine displeasure.

In their view, Donaldson had abandoned past principled positions on the Irish Sea border, expediently pretending that he had got rid of the trade barrier when in fact it obviously remained.

This is anathema to a section of the party; its roots lie in standing lonely outside the camp of the establishment and protesting loudly, not compromising for the sake of power.

Some of those people will see this Good Friday catastrophe as divine judgment.

To do so would be entirely in keeping with how the party has linked the everyday and the spiritual.

When Margaret Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, Paisley thundered in prayer from the pulpit of his cavernous Martyrs’ Memorial church: “We hand this woman, Margaret Thatcher over to the Devil that she might learn not to blaspheme.

“We pray that the world may learn a lesson through her fall and through the ignominy to which she shall be brought. Oh God, in wrath, take vengeance upon this wicked, treacherous, lying woman.”

Just because DUP members don’t speak like that these days doesn’t mean that these concepts are suddenly foreign to all of them, even if many now have more prosaic ways of understanding what has befallen their party.

Under the man who now leads the DUP, that language is never likely to be heard — and within the party he is expected to move it further from its hardline roots. Gavin Robinson is a protege of Peter Robinson (although they aren’t related), the pragmatist whose organisational skills and ruthlessness moulded the erratic charisma of Paisley into something which became much more than Paisleyism.

Having joined the party as a schoolboy, the man who now leads the DUP temporarily — but is likely to win the job permanently, even if there is a contest — was immersed in its east Belfast operation.

After training as a barrister, in his early 20s Peter Robinson as first minister brought him into Stormont Castle as one of his special advisers. He cleared the way for him to become a Belfast councillor, lord mayor of the city and ultimately it was the younger Robinson who won back the East Belfast House of Commons seat which had long been Robinson senior’s until Alliance’s Naomi Long’s stunning victory in 2010.

Gavin Robinson’s politics are close to those of the man he has replaced. Both are pragmatic moderates who believe in devolution. Robinson was one of the few DUP members heavily involved in negotiating Donaldson’s deal to restore devolution. He therefore needs that deal to work — not just because he believes in it, but because his reputation is tied to its success.

Even if a hardliner was to dislodge Robinson in a leadership contest, there’s no discernible logic to collapsing Stormont. Having spent two months making arguments in favour of devolution and pretending to have got rid of the sea border, the DUP would look like fools if they were to suddenly go back to a policy of boycott. Significant numbers of moderates would be more likely to leave in those circumstances (tellingly, for all the internal displeasure at Donaldson’s deal, not a single hardline member has left).

It’s more likely that Robinson feels the need to buy off some of his senior colleagues by toning down the ‘love-in’ between Emma Little-Pengelly and Michelle O’Neill. Working with Sinn Fein is something every DUP member got over a long time ago; looking like they’re enjoying it is something many of them find incomprehensible.

But the impact of Donaldson’s fall is about more than the DUP. As the leader of unionism, he had a wider responsibility. One intelligent unionist not given to melodrama texted me on Friday evening to say: “They have destroyed everything they have touched. It’s really remarkable. It feels like the end of days now.”

Donaldson’s gushing official biography records how his Presbyterian minister urged him to join the ministry, something to which he gave “serious consideration”.

But the young politician told the cleric that “his idea was not to use (politics) as a vehicle for personal advancement, but as an avenue for upholding, and demonstrating, in a public and practical way, Christian values and beliefs”.

For those who voted for Jeffrey Donaldson on that basis, the events of the last few days have rocked them in ways which go way beyond the political.

Piety and politics have always been entwined in the DUP. Not all its members are religious, but all its members know it is a religious party. Some of them will likely see Donaldson's downfall as evidence of divine displeasure.
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— Sam McBride (@SJAMcBride) March 31, 2024