Jeffrey Donaldson was a dangerous predator. Where is Belfast’s anger now?

Despite the high-profile nature of the crime and the criminal, Jeffrey Donaldson’s four-week trial passed mostly without incident. Every day the former head of the Democratic Unionist party, who on Monday was found guilty of 18 counts of child sexual abuse, was delivered to Newry crown court by black car. Every day a police barricade was erected in case of any potential unrest, and then deconstructed. There wasn’t any.

Donaldson, a teetotal Christian who worked under Enoch Powell and was knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth, pleaded not guilty to all charges, which were committed against two women when they were children and included one count of rape.

The abuse began when the women were primary school pupils but did not come out until 2021, when one of them confronted Donaldson about a letter he had written to her the previous year, in which he professed regret for his “sinful and selfish actions”. Even then, Donaldson’s crimes were kept behind closed doors and handled locally rather than reported to police: as early as the 1990s, one of the women told a pastor that taking her case further would “destroy Donaldson’s reputation”. When in 2024 one of the women finally built up the courage to go to the police about Donaldson, she told them how she had spent her life watching him in a public role “getting accolade after accolade”.

Donaldson must have thought himself untouchable. By the time his case came to trial in May he had abandoned his earlier act of contrition and resorted to a tactic well trodden by abusers: he said the women were lying. He denied that certain acts had happened and was particularly indignant about claims his wife had witnessed the abuse. “The idea I was standing there with a child with her clothes pulled up and feeling her chest… and my wife walked in and saw this and just walked out again is unbelievable,” he told the court. “There is no situation where that happened.”

Still, a jury of five women and seven men returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Donaldson’s wife, Eleanor, was judged unfit to face a criminal trial on mental health grounds, but in a “trial of the facts” was found by the jury to have aided and abetted her husband’s abuse.

If Donaldson received special treatment in his political life up to this point, that has ended – he now becomes a criminal like any other. He is spending his first nights in HMP Maghaberry as he awaits what the judge said would be an inevitable and “lengthy” prison sentence. He will also be obliged to sign the sex offender register. He will almost certainly be stripped of his knighthood and membership of the privy council.

His reputation in tatters, Donaldson will fade from public view in ignominy. But the fact he was able to hide in plain sight for so long, that his crimes were excused and controlled by the conservative Christian community he had built around himself, should be a moment to pause and ask why, and how, it was allowed.

Donaldson showed no emotion as he was sent down on Monday, but what was curious about his trial was that Belfast showed no emotion either.

There were no riots on the streets of the city, no raging about a culture of violence against women and girls by Elon Musk or Tommy Robinson, who were only too happy to whip tempers up to a frenzy just a fortnight ago after a knife attack for which a Sudanese man has been charged with attempted murder. The loyalist gangs who took to the streets then, burning buses and houses under the guise of “protecting children” from abuse by dangerous men, do not appear to be bothered that the former head of the DUP has turned out to be one of those men.

One of Northern Ireland’s most powerful men was able to abuse children with impunity. Why doesn’t that inspire anger from Northern Ireland’s angriest men?

Photograph by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images