Well Established DUP Processes & Jeffrey Donaldson
The Bridge at Scarva · No. 4
A party was warned, on the record, that a woman said she had been exploited by the man about to become its leader. It now says it never knew. The conviction was the mask off one man. This is the machine that fitted it, and the processes that were established not to look.
When the verdict came, the condemnation was immediate and total. Gavin Robinson said the full force of the law should be felt, that Donaldson had betrayed the trust of his colleagues. Edwin Poots reached for the Gospel, the millstone and the depths of the sea. The party itself, asked by the BBC’s Spotlight, called him filthy and vile. None of this was wrong, and all of it was free. Condemning a convicted child abuser the day after the verdict costs a party precisely nothing. It is the easiest sentence in politics to say.
The harder sentence, the one that costs something, the party also said, with less thunder. It said it had not known. Robinson, asked on Monday whether his party had questions to answer over all of this, said he was clear in his mind: he was not aware, and senior members were not aware. The party’s statement to Spotlight went further. It had no knowledge of the issues raised, it was shocked to learn of them, it had well-established processes for dealing with complaints and standards, and at no time had it received any complaint, internally or externally, about inappropriate or criminal behaviour by Jeffrey Donaldson. Hold that phrase, because the whole of this turns on it. Well-established processes. We will come back to what they processed.
The warning
Because there is another account, and it is not a rumour and it is not anonymous. Ian Paisley, the former DUP MP for North Antrim, has said, on camera and in text messages the Belfast Telegraph has seen and verified as sent from his phone, that three years before Donaldson’s arrest he spoke to a young woman who said Donaldson had exploited and used her. He spoke to her and to her father. He has said it was not some second-hand rumour. Asked directly by Spotlight whether he told the party leadership, he said he told the new leader. He said he made sure it was recorded, and that he told people senior in the party. In his own words, it was not a secret. It was, he said, well known.
The woman is not the subject of this piece and she will not be made one. Her account is hers, she came forward, and when she later understood what she might be holding she took it to the police, which is the thing a person is supposed to do. What concerns the machine is not her. It is what the people she warned did with the warning. And here the record is not kind, because the one figure who acted on it did not act to protect anyone. On his own verified messages, Paisley tried to use what he held as leverage, to get a colleague to swing behind Poots in the 2021 leadership contest rather than Donaldson. The warning was real. It was simply treated, by the man who held it, as ammunition rather than as an alarm. That is the first thing the machine teaches you. A thing can be known by many and acted on by none, because knowing it and doing something about it are different transactions, with different prices.
So set the two accounts beside each other, because that is all this requires. The party says it never knew. Paisley says he told senior people and made sure it was recorded. Both statements are on the public record, made by named people. They cannot both be complete. One of them has a gap in it, and the gap is the story.
The formula
Edwin Poots was the new leader Paisley says he told. Poots won the 2021 contest, held the leadership for twenty-one days, and was then deposed by Donaldson, who, in the words of the former MLA Jim Wells, launched a guerrilla campaign against him. Asked now about what Paisley says he was told, Poots did not deny being told. He said he had observed the wishes of the young woman at all times.
Read that slowly, because it is doing a great deal of quiet work. It is offered as discretion, the respectful handling of a woman who did not want a formal complaint, and at that level it is defensible, because you cannot drag an unwilling person into a process. But notice what it cannot help admitting. You cannot observe the wishes of a woman you were never told about. The sentence is a denial of nothing and a confirmation of everything. Poots knew. The phrasing simply moves the knowledge into a register where it sounds like care.
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And the register is the tell. This week Poots reached for the millstone and the depths of the sea, the loudest condemnation scripture offers. In 2021, told of a woman who said she had been exploited by the man about to take the party, he observed her wishes and said nothing in public. The volume is inversely proportional to the cost. Loud now, when Donaldson is convicted and condemnation is free. Silent then, when speaking would have cost him a leadership war he was already losing. This is the agentless sentence this column has met before, the grammar that goes quiet exactly where naming has a price, spoken here by the man who now sits as Speaker of the Assembly.
The blind eye and the processes that did not process
Two men who saw the material say it did not stop with one MP. Jim Allister, who says he saw the Paisley texts three years ago, says Donaldson was unsuitable to lead because of his lifestyle, and that he does not believe only a single MP knew, that this could not have existed in a vacuum. Jim Wells says he has no doubt the senior leadership knew of the wider behaviour, and that because the women involved were adult and the encounters consensual, a blind eye was turned and Donaldson was waved through to the leadership.
These are beliefs, held by two men with long histories inside and against the party, and they must be carried as exactly that. Allister believes. Wells has no doubt. Neither produces the document that proves the leadership knew, and the party denies it flatly. So the honest line is the narrow one: two senior figures who saw the material are convinced the knowledge went wider, the party says it did not, and both of those things are now on the record. The reader may weigh them. The writer does not get to collapse them.
But notice with care what Allister and Wells are describing, because it is the wall this whole piece is built against, and it must never be breached. They are describing the lifestyle. The drink, the conduct with adult women, the exploitation claim, the hypocrisy of the godly man. On Paisley’s account there was a trade mission to Beijing where Donaldson was too drunk to stand, and a bar in Washington in 2008 where he behaved disgracefully toward a female colleague. That is the behaviour Wells says was tolerated. It is not the crimes. No one on that programme, not Paisley, not Allister, not Wells, said the party knew Jeffrey Donaldson was abusing children, and this piece does not say it either. The thing a blind eye was turned to was a man who was drunk and entitled and a hypocrite and the subject of a woman’s grave allegation. That was enough to disqualify him from the leadership. It was not enough to stop him, because stopping him was expensive and looking away was free.
Which returns us to the well-established processes. The party says it has them. The party says no complaint reached it, internally or externally. Paisley says he told senior people and made sure it was recorded. Both cannot be wholly true, and whichever way the gap falls, the processes do not emerge well from it. If a warning was given and recorded and the processes never engaged, the processes failed. If the processes were never engaged because nothing was ever formally lodged, then the party is leaning on the word complaint to carry a weight it cannot bear, defining away a warning it was given so that it can say, truthfully and on a technicality, that no complaint was received. Either reading lands in the same place. The processes were well established. What they were established to do, when the cost of acting was a leadership and the man was about to be useful, was not look.
Who kept signing the guarantee
The last column read the man, and called him a guarantor: a figure whose entire product was his standing, sold to his party, to two governments, to the Americans, and to the people of his own tradition. This one asks the question that one left open. Who kept buying it.
Because the standing did not maintain itself. A safe seat returned him for nearly thirty years. An honours system made him a knight in 2016. Two governments treated him as the indispensable man of the process. Washington feted him every March. Weeks before his arrest he was bound for the House of Lords. None of that is the DUP’s doing alone, and that is the point. The machine that carried Jeffrey Donaldson was larger than any one party. It was a whole apparatus of British and Irish public life with an interest in his usefulness and no interest at all in looking past the suit. The warning that reached his party in 2021 is simply the one place where we can watch the machine choosing, in a documented moment, not to look. There were others. There is always an other. A man does not travel from a Drumcree barricade to the threshold of the Lords without a very large number of people agreeing, year on year, not to ask the awkward question, because the awkward question is always dearer than the silence.
The fixed result
So what does the contradiction mean. Less than the loudest voices this week want it to mean, and more than the party can afford to admit. It does not mean the DUP knew it was carrying a child abuser. Nothing on the record says that, and this column will not say it. It means something narrower and, in its way, more damning, because it is so ordinary. A party was warned, by one of its own, on the record, that a woman said she had been exploited by the man about to become its leader. It did not act on the warning as a warning. One man traded it as leverage. Another observed the wishes of the woman and kept his silence. The leadership, two insiders are convinced, knew enough of the wider pattern to look away, because the women were adult and the man was useful. And when it was all finally dragged into the daylight by a court and a broadcaster, the party reached for the loudest condemnation available and, in the same breath, said it had never known, and that its processes were well established.
They were. That is the whole trouble. The processes were established, and they were observed, and they delivered precisely the outcome they were built to deliver, which was that a man nobody would look at squarely was carried all the way to the top and held there until a jury, and not one of those processes, finally stopped him. At Scarva the result is fixed before the muskets are loaded, and King William wins every year because the play is written that way. The machine is the same. It did not fail. It worked, and what it was built to do was not see.
Postscript, 26th June 2026.
This piece went up late on the night of the 26th. Earlier that evening, before the Spotlight broadcast, the DUP issued a further statement, and it is worth recording for how far it travels from the first. The party that three days earlier said it had no knowledge now says it is deeply concerned, that some may have had knowledge of inappropriate behaviour, and that this was never reported to the party officers. It has commissioned an independent review into issues arising from the conviction.
That is the contradiction resolving itself in writing, hours before this was published. You do not commission an independent review into a thing you are sure never happened. And the operative phrase is the party’s own: whatever was known was never reported to the officers. That is the process failing, and the party naming the failure, in the same breath.
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.
