Nothing To Answer For. Edwin Poots on Jeffrey Donaldson
The Bridge at Scarva · No. 5
Asked to step aside from the Speaker’s chair while his party investigates what its leaders knew about Jeffrey Donaldson, Edwin Poots refused, and told the chamber he has nothing to answer for. He is right that nothing has been proved against him. He is wrong about what kind of question he was being asked.
The last sitting day before recess, the chamber half-attending, the Speaker in his place. The day before, he had handed the gavel to a deputy and come down from the chair for the debate, a man, you would have thought, conceding that he could hardly preside over an argument about himself. Monday told you what the gesture was worth. He would give up the chairing of the conversation. He would not give up the chair the conversation was about. He would step off the stage for the length of the scene and keep the part for the rest of the run.
And when his moment came he rose with all the wounded grandeur of a man for whom the only subject in the room is his own good name. His integrity, he said, had been impugned. Not one iota of evidence of wrongdoing had been laid before him, or before the public. He had covered up nothing, done nothing untoward, and therefore, therefore, there was nothing to answer for and no earthly reason he should stand aside. It was a performance of total vindication, and on the facts as he had arranged them on the table before him, he was not even wrong. That is the trouble with it. He had reached for the one test he was always going to pass, and he passed it in front of everybody, and he called the passing of it an answer.
The wrong test
So let us do the thing this column exists to do, and watch how the trick is worked, slowly, because it is worked quickly and in the open and most of the room will wave it through.
“I have not had one iota of evidence presented to me or indeed to the public of wrongdoing on my part.”
Hold each word of it. Evidence. Presented. Wrongdoing. Proved, or not proved. He has reached, and nobody has marked the reaching, for the standard of a criminal court, the test you apply in the one room on earth where a man’s liberty is the stake and you must be certain before you take it from him. It is a noble test. It is the right test. It is the right test in a courtroom, which is the single place in the building Edwin Poots was not standing on Monday.
Because the chair he holds is not kept by that test, and never has been. The Speakership is the one seat in that chamber lifted up out of the party brawl, the seat that does not function at all unless every bench, on every side, believes the person in it can be trusted to be fair. That belief has a name. The name is confidence. And confidence is not the absence of a conviction. You do not acquire it by failing to be found guilty of something. It is extended, like a loan, on trust, and it can be called in quietly long before any charge is ever drafted, and a Speaker who finds he must remind the chamber that nothing has been proved against him has, in the very act of saying it, told you the loan is already being recalled.
So watch the direction of the thing, because he has turned it cleanly around. The holder of a confidence office does not fold his arms and dare the room to convict him. He accounts. He stands, and explains himself, the whole of it, and lets the chamber weigh whether the confidence survives the explanation. That is the job. On a day like this it is the entire job. And Edwin Poots, asked the confidence question, answered the proof question, and held the answer to the second one up to the light as though it had disposed of the first. Asked can we still trust you in that chair, he said you have not proved I did wrong. They are not the same question. They were never the same question. And the reason he answered the one and not the other is the oldest reason a man ever swapped a hard question for an easy one in front of a crowd. The proof question, he could win. The confidence question is the open one, the one with no certain end. So he won the question he could win, and lifted the cup, and asked us to read the wrong trophy.
In fairness
Set the blade down a moment, because the cut only lands if the man is given his full due, and he is owed it.
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His account is this. In 2021, when he and Donaldson were at each other’s throats for the leadership, a colleague carried to him a young woman’s claim that Donaldson had exploited her. There was, he says, nothing of a criminal or a safeguarding nature in what reached him. The woman was an adult throughout. She was offered support, and the routes by which she might lodge a formal complaint with a number of bodies, and she declined them. It was not his place, he says, to go and do the very thing she had asked, plainly and by name, that nobody do.
Grant it, because it is fair, and because the adult point is real and not a lawyer’s flourish. You cannot frog march a grown woman into a complaints process she has refused, and the man who tried it would have earned a column of his own. Grant, too, that Poots did more on Monday than buff his own halo. He has asked the assembly’s chief executive to examine Donaldson’s years in the institution, expressly so that anyone harmed there might come forward, and he said he would press the head of the Civil Service and the Speaker of the Commons to open the same doors elsewhere. That is a real thing to do, with a real purpose, and an honest account of the day records it without a sneer.
Hold all of it. And now hold, beside it, the one fact that will not lie flat. The reason he gives for there having been nothing to act upon in 2021 is that the woman was an adult. The thing he does in 2026 is open a formal road for victims of abuse to come forward. The instinct he says was never triggered is the instinct he is, this very week, reaching over to switch on. I will not tell you that proves he failed a duty, because it does not, and this column does not say it does. That is unproved, it is the very thing his party’s review is now meant to weigh, and it is not the charge. The charge is smaller, and it is his alone, and there is no slipping out of it, because it is built from his own mouth. The test he reached for to keep the chair, nothing to answer for, is the test of a man in a dock. And the chair is not a thing you keep by acquittal. It is a thing you keep by trust. He answered the easy question because it was the one he could win. And he has been answering the easy question all along.
“We observed the wishes of the young woman”
was the easy question last week.
“Nothing has been proved against me”
is the easy question this week. Different week. Same swap.
Marking their own homework
And he was not, on Monday, the only man in that building marking his own paper and reading out the grade.
A few yards from the Speaker declining to leave his chair, the leader of his party stood explaining why the DUP can be trusted to investigate the DUP. The review, Gavin Robinson now says, will be “independent.” It will be led by a person of impeccable credentials in child safeguarding. It will take in the party’s own safeguarding policy. It will run some twelve weeks. And it will be published, save for the parts that will not be, which are to be held back for reasons of personal data. That is movement, and it is pressure doing its work, and say so. But it does not lay a finger on the objection, because the objection does not bend to good intentions. A review the party calls, the party scopes, and the party prints at its own discretion, with the blue pencil in its own hand, is the party sitting in judgment on the party, however spotless the judge it has hired. Matthew O’Toole put it in the five plainest words of the day. They cannot mark their own homework. It is the Speaker’s move exactly, raised one storey. The institution under suspicion names the examination it would like to sit, appoints the examiner, keeps the right to score out the answers it dislikes, and then reads its own result aloud as the thing that ought to reassure you. Confidence is not proof. Homework is not independence. And no body in the history of the world has ever rebuilt trust in itself by the simple expedient of awarding itself the prize.
The fixed result
Every July, in a demesne in County Down, the loyal orders stage the Sham Fight at Scarva, which is the nearest thing this island keeps to a sacred pantomime. Two men in costume, one crowned for King William and one for King James, ride out and refight the Battle of the Boyne before the crowd, with horse and cannon and musket, and it is a tremendous show. The muskets are loaded with blanks. And King William wins. King William always wins. King William has won at Scarva every summer for the best part of two centuries, because King William is written to win, because who won was never the question the day was asking. The pageant is the question, and the pageant requires only that the correct man be left standing when the smoke clears. Nobody travels to Scarva to learn the result. They go to watch the winning happen again.
That is what was staged at Stormont on Monday, and it is what will be staged across the twelve weeks to come. A Speaker rises to be judged, and appoints himself the judge, and finds, upon mature reflection, for the Speaker. A party stands accused, and commissions the inquiry, and writes its terms, and holds the pencil, and will tell us in the autumn what the inquiry was permitted to find. The muskets are loaded with blanks. The result is written before the first shot. You are not being summoned to a reckoning. You are being summoned to a re-enactment, in which the man in the costume of accountability rides out, and the smoke lifts, and look, there he is, still mounted, exactly as the script set down, and the crowd is meant to file home content that justice has refought its old battle and won it once more.
But here is what the staging forgets, and given what lies beneath this particular pageant it must be said with no ornament at all. A sham fight works only for as long as everyone in the field agrees to call the blanks real. The moment the crowd stops pretending the muskets are loaded, it is not a battle. It is a man in fancy dress, on a horse, in a field, insisting he has won a fight that was never fought. Edwin Poots says he has nothing to answer for, and he is telling a truth he did not mean to tell. It is not the verdict at the close of an account. It is the reason there will be no account. He has loaded the muskets with blanks, ridden out, and declared himself the winner of a battle he was never going to lose, because he is the one who wrote it so he could not. His party means to do the same, at greater length, when the evenings draw in. And this is not a costume drama in a County Down field. It issues from a courtroom in Newry and the conviction of a man for the rape of a child, and it asks a public that has just watched real justice do real and terrible work to come now and stand in the stage smoke and applaud a fixed fight as though it were the same thing. It is not the same thing. The result at Scarva is settled before the muskets are raised. It always has been. The one thing at Scarva that was ever truly in doubt is whether the rest of us would keep turning up, and call it a contest, and go home.
A column for people who would rather know how the trick is done than be assured there isn’t one. Part of a wider body of work on Irish politics and unity. Follow on for the rest.
