Many questions arise from the criminal child abuse conviction of ex Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. Between 1985 and 2008 Donaldson raped and abused two courageous women who came forward in 2023.
In that 23 year period the political career of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson blossomed.
A very perceptive analyst, LouthForEver, offers useful context :
For forty years Jeffrey Donaldson was the respectable face of a certain unionism, lecturing the Irish Catholics of the six counties on law, order and godliness. He has woken in a cell, a convicted child rapist. This is the gap the column exists to read, and it has never been wider.
He spent Monday night in Maghaberry, the first of many. That afternoon a jury of seven men and five women in Newry had deliberated for ten hours and found him guilty on every one of eighteen counts, one of rape, thirteen of indecent assault, four of gross indecency, against two children, on dates running from 1985 to 2008. He showed no emotion as the foreman spoke. He wore a small Christian fish pin on the lapel of a pristine navy suit. For four weeks he had called the two women liars from the witness stand. The jury believed them, unanimously, and the judge told a silent courtroom that a long sentence was now inevitable.
Begin there, and stay there, because everything that follows is built on that floor and must never float free of it. The two women are not material for an argument. What was done to them as children is theirs, and it is not anyone’s evidence. The only thing owed them is the plain fact that they were believed. Everything else here is about the man, and the forty years of borrowed authority the verdict has demolished.
Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s editor, said: “It’s nice to see that Private Eye was getting close enough to the truth fifteen years ago to make some really appalling people – and their fine upstanding legal representatives – nervous.”
Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s editor, said: “It’s nice to see that Private Eye was getting close enough to the truth fifteen years ago to make some really appalling people – and their fine upstanding legal representatives – nervous.🧵3/5
“In our experience, it usually does take quite a while for prosecutors, justice departments and governments to sit up and take notice of what Private Eye has been saying all along.”
“In our experience, it usually does take quite a while for prosecutors, justice departments and governments to sit up and take notice of what Private Eye has been saying all along.”🧵4/5
Individuals operating within the network created by the late Jeffrey Epstein hired numerous people who threatened media organisations which were investigating a vast child abuse and financial corruption racket. One such individual was the Belfast Lawyer Paul Tweed, who wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 calling the magazine Private Eye “an absolute rag” :
This is the relevant magazine cover :
Belfast Telegraph Political Correspondent Sam McBride has done a fine job investigating the murky professional relationships between Paul Tweed, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein.
The big lesson here is that the British and USA states ignored credible evidence for many years uncovered by investigators. This “tug the forelock” behaviour must cease. A first step in Ireland is to cease all official visits by members of the corrupt British royal family.
The least we can say is this :
Read here here the carefully chosen recent words of Belfast journalist Suzanne Breen, Belfast Telegraph political correspondent and a frequent contributor to BBC NI politics programmes :
“Chris Moore says William McGrath worked for MI5, and it’s even possible that he was planted in the children’s home as part of an intelligence-gathering operation. The journalist makes a compelling case that MI5 — at the very least — knew about what was happening and kept quiet.
Shamefully, there has been no adequate inquiry into Kincora. Some files have been destroyed, while others have been locked away by the British government to 2065 and 2085.
The most marginalised and vulnerable children were raped by powerful men, allegedly including King Charles’ grand uncle.
The building at the centre of the scandal was demolished three years ago, but the cover up of the crimes committed behind its walls continues. It is long past the time that the full truth was told about what happened in the house of horrors.”
The journalist Suzanne Breen is a political correspondent of the Belfast Telegraph and a regular contributor to BBC current affairs programmes about the Northern Ireland state.
Chris Moore from Belfast is no ordinary journalist.
He has worked for decades on the Kincora child abuse scandal. After extensive new research he makes credible allegations about the British royal family’s Lord Mountbatten (killed by an August 1979 IRA bomb in the western Irish county of Sligo) and a wide-ranging British state cover-up.
Kincora: Britain’s Shame – Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up
Readers are recommended to go and see the film “Lost Boys” whenever they get the chance – despite the British State’s efforts to kill the story, aided and abetted by the Irish police force, An Gárda Síochána (Guardians of the Peace).
All of this is grim reading.
The UK government has locked up files on Kincora until 2065 & 2085.Veteran investigative journalist Chris Moore’s new book, ‘Kincora: Britain’s Shame’, launched last night in a packed Duke of York bar, means we don’t have to wait until then. #mustread
Tomás Ó Flatharta 