Tomás Ó Flatharta

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.