1. The Irish Times has failed its readers.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson could have become First Minister of Northern Ireland after his election as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2021, but chose instead to remain in the House of Commons.
The perception in the circles of power Dublin was that he did not want to strain his relationship with a male lover in London.
The dogs in the streets of Dublin became aware of the rumour that he had a male lover in London.
It is now – finally – being reported as fact.
The story did the rounds in Dublin for years. Knowledge of the relationship was a staple of private discussions in Dublin media circles and among officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and some Irish politicians.
But the general public was kept in the dark until Sunday Life reported it on 28 June 2026.
Put simply, the people controlling the Irish and British media let Donaldson lead a double life despite his hypocritical opposition to gay marriage. Why would The Irish Times, a champion of gay rights, have permitted Donaldson – the arch hypocrite – to demean, endanger, bait and disrespect the gay community?
Did they not know what every taxi driver in Dublin knew?
Donaldson’s behaviour was all the more concerning because he had once mixed with the group of Unionist politicians who preyed upon boys at Kincora Boys’ Home scandal and other similar establishments.
Should further children emerge to reveal abuse at the hands of Donaldson, the media can hang its head in shame. They could have exposed Donaldson years ago.
Why did they turn a blind eye?
One thing is certain: reporting the truth would have risked casting fresh light on the Kincora scandal.
Instead, the Dublin media (with the exception of Village and The Phoenix) went along with the egregious Hart Report of 2017, which knowingly and dishonestly dismissed the notion that MI5 and MI6 had exploited the paedophile ring that swirled around Kincora.
It mattered not a jot to The Irish Times that the ghosts of Kincora were still manipulating Irish politics.
Why?
2. The Irish Times must explain why it ignored the Donaldson story for so long.
The Irish Times is by far the most culpable party in the Republic of Ireland. It holds itself out and competent, courageous and skilled. It is none of these things.
It sneers at the rest of the media believing that it alone has the wit to tell the public what is going on in the world.
It will now have to explain to its readers why it failed to investigate Donaldson, a key player in all the monumental events of the last few decades:
- the peace process;
- the Good Friday Agreement;
- the chaos over Brexit and the Irish border; and
- the precarious existence of the parliament at NI Assembly at Stormont.
Jeffrey Donaldson was one of the handful of DUP MPs who held the balance of power in the UK after the 2017 general election. Theresa May had to go cap in hand to buy their support.
Donaldson was the man who represented Loyalism during Brexit. He negotiated on behalf of the DUP with Dublin.
Still, The Irish Times did not blink an eyelid.
The Irish Times simply cannot pretend that it was asleep at the wheel. No one is that incompetent. And, anyway, some of the heavy lifting had been done for them and was there on a plate in the form of reports in Village and Phoenix magazines.
One clue might lie in the fact that one of the paper’s most important reporters – now working elsewhere – is a collector of pornographic images of young boys. The Provisional IRA became aware of this during the Troubles. It is likely that MI5 did too.
It is equally likely that this rotund individual and other equally compromised reporters have been blackmailed by MI5 and MI6 for decades and cannot tread on the toes of the British government.
The Irish Times has a long history of acting as a conduit for British intelligence propaganda. See: Our Man in Dublin. [WebBook]
Village magazine reported links between Donaldson and Enoch Powell MP in 2021.
Enoch Powell was a paedophile who liked to beat up boys with a belt while abusing them. One of his victims was Richard Kerr. No one at The Irish Times approached Kerr, despite his story having been reported by me in Village. Kerr had appeared on the BBC and Channel 4 at this stage.
Why is this important? Perhaps because Donaldson’s website stated how much admiration he had for Powell. It was obvious that his relationship with Powell was the tip of a sinister iceberg, one that is now floating into focus.
Time after time, The Irish Times ignores stories which MI6 and the British embassy find embarrassing. Compare the coverage of British intelligence activities in The Phoenix during its 43-year existence with that of The Irish Times.
At the same time, the paper promotes an anti-neutrality stance, something which fits hand-in-glove with the openly stated policy of the British government. See Psyop.
There was a time in the 1980s, while The Irish Times was edited by Douglas Gageby, that Britain’s allies in the paper were unable to control the narrative about Kincora. Ed Moloney was one of those responsible for digging up dirt about the scandal. He had sources at the top of the UDA who disclosed a lot of what they knew to him.
What happened to Moloney next defies belief. He tried to print an expose of the Official IRA in 1982. The Official IRA had an undue influence at the paper who were almost certainly working with MI6 to undermine the Provisional IRA.
Moloney came close to losing his life.
MI6 and the Official IRA must have been delighted when this affair caused Moloney to leave the paper.
MI5 also destroyed Chris Moore’s attempts to expose the truth about Kincora at BBC NI.
See: BBC.
3. Donaldson and the Kincora vice ring.
The Donaldson link to Enoch Powell MP – highlighted by Village in 2021 – threatened to expose elements of the Kincora scandal, something that would have been a severe embarrassment to the British Establishment, which exploited it for blackmail purposes.
Donaldson’s twisted sex life is probably a result of being abused by the Kincora paedophiles, such as Enoch Powell PM. This may have happened while he was a teenager. It is a fact well recognised by medical experts in the field of psychiatry that abuse victims often turn into abusers.
4. Protecting Donaldson’s victims.
The British media is prohibited from reporting the absolute nadir of Donaldson’s perverse depravity. This is for good reason – the protection of two of his victims. His behaviour in respect of these victims is so utterly depraved, disgusting and shocking, that it corroborates the the likelihood that Donaldson was abused in his youth, causing him to lose all empathy and self control. I suspect Enoch Powell is the man who derailed Donaldson.
5. Donaldson’s Pious Christianity.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was originally a member of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). His mentor was Enoch Powell MP.
The UUP was led by James Molyneaux MP, 1979-95.
Donaldson inherited Molyneaux’s Westminster seat when the older man resigned in 1997.
Molyneaux was also part of the Kincora circle, again something The Irish Times refuses to investigate despite reports in Village and elsewhere for years.
Donaldson switched to the DUP at the invitation of Peter Robinson in 2003.
Donaldson was relentless in the presentation of himself as one of God’s most ardent, sincere and pious front-line soldiers. He highlighted his religious beliefs during multiple TV and press interviews and public appearances.
He prayed with victims of sex abuse.
He gave sex education lessons to teenagers at his church’s Sunday School, warning them to avoid sin.
He opposed gay marriage.
Why did The Irish Times not expose any aspect of his hypocrisy, particulary after he opposed gay marriage?
Below is an interview clip from GB News during which Donaldson extols his Christian beliefs. The broadcast was hosted by an appreciative Arlene Foster, who led the DUP from December 2015 to May 2021. He spoke of the positive impact of a ‘faith approach to politics’, and why the Church should not be afraid to ‘raise its voice’ on political issues. ‘I find increasingly the Christian Church is reluctant to get involved in debate in the public square’, he bemoaned.
6. Donaldson’s sordid double life.
In reality, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP, was a sex pest, rapist, adulterer, liar and child abuser.
He was also a drunkard who projectile vomited over the Mayor of Beijing during a trade trip to China.
During a trip to Washington, a drunk Donaldson sat on top of a female Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). Ian Paisley Jnr told BBC NI’s Spotlight that he had witnessed Donaldson, blind drunk, trying to kiss her in a restaurant in a hotel. She was disgusted and slipped his clutches.
This fact alone establishes that his colleagues knew he was a sex pest. Had The Irish Times no sources in Unionism that relayed this sort of information to them? Are they really that useless?
Jim Allister MP, formerly of the DUP, and currently leader of Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), has spoken of rumours about Donaldson’s ‘proclivities’ and ‘risky lifestyle’ which predated his arrest in 2024. Again, if he knew, how could The Irish Times not have known?
Publicly, Donaldson described homosexuality as ‘sinful’. Yet he frequented at least one gay sauna, called Chariots, in London.
Two PSNI officers watched him enter the premises: Tim Hanley, former head of the PSNI’s Serious Crime Branch and a colleague, a detective inspector. Both were in London working with MI5, whose HQ was very close to Chariots. Hanley disclosed this incident to Mandy McAuley of Spotlight.
Chariots was a sex club. 300 naked or semi-naked men would attend at peak hours. Customers went seeking sexual encounters. Sexual acts took place in open spaces and semi-private rooms.
If rumours are true, Donaldson also availed of the services of male and female prostitutes in London.
He was able to kick another DUP paedophile out of the party without missing a beat.
To the public, he was a zealous Christian gay basher, one who defended the right of a bakery shop in Belfast to refuse to provide a cake to a gay couple. He likened the couple to the Shankill Butchers. See the next video clip. The media let him get away with this blatant and cruel act of hypocrisy, too.
Donaldson featured in the 2009 Westminster expenses scandal. He had to apologise for seeking and receiving reimbursement for £660 worth of pay-per-view movies on his parliamentary expense account. He repaid the money.
Details of Donaldson’s expense claims were published in The Daily Telegraph. It quoted sources in a number of hotels who said the movies included adult films.
In a statement to The Daily Telegraph, Donaldson said he had not watched anything adult or pornographic. ‘Such material was not viewed on the date alleged, or at all,’ he insisted.
One hotel bill made reference to ‘room service 2’. Asked by The Daily Telegraph what the reference meant, Donaldson’s solicitor, said: ‘Clearly, it is impossible to be precise in relation to each and every item.’
None of this prompted The Irish Times to consider the broader possibility that Donaldson – the leader of Unionism – was a compromised figure.
Donaldson proclaimed his high regard for Powell and Molyneaux throughout his career.
Donaldson was Molyneaux’s electoral agent. Molyneaux was a homosexual who was interested in young males, and a friend of William McGrath, the housefather of Kincora Boys’ Home. McGrath and others ran Kincora as a ‘honey pot’ for Loyalist paedophiles, for MI5.
Another of Donaldson’s mentors was Enoch Powell MP, a sadistic paedophile who abused at least one boy from Kincora. See Jeffrey Donaldson Mentor
Donaldson probably knows some of the sordid secrets of Kincora.
Perhaps one day, Donaldson will reveal whether or not his relationship with Powell and Molyneaux was purely political. He may reveal other details about the sexuality of his colleagues, too.
See also Donaldson and Molyneaux.
7. A Clockwork Orangeman.
Donaldson was also a member of the Orange Order before he was expelled after his conviction.
The Rev. Martin Smyth was Grand Master of the Orange Order from 1972 to 1998. According to a 1973 press release issued by Colin Wallace, a PsyOp officer at Lisburn British Army HQ, concerning William McGrath, the Rev. Smyth and James Molyneaux were aware of what was taking place at Kincora.
MI5 destroyed Wallace’s career after he persisted in attempting to expose the abuse at Kincora. See our Operation Clockwork Orange series starting here: Operation Clockwork Orange Vol 1 [WebBook.]
7. An astonishing and honest statement about the ‘leverage’ and reality of politics in Northern Ireland.
MI5’s file on Donaldson must be voluminous.
In what must amount to one of the most important statements made about the reality of politics in Northern Ireland, Norman Baxter, the former Operational Director of Intelligence of the PSNI Special Branch, told Mandy McAuley of BBC NI’s Spotlight that the government, i.e. MI5, guided figures like Donaldson, who had compromised backgrounds, in the direction they wished politics to travel. Baxter told Spotlight:
‘Well, I’d be convinced that the Northern Ireland Office or an element of the government would have known of that behaviour [Donaldson’s sexual activities] because it’s their role to know. Part of managing the peace process is to understand the political actors – to profile and to understand where there is political leverage, and then you apply mechanisms to guide them to where you want the political position to be. I mean, the government would have been failing in their responsibility not to deep-dive into the activities of MPs or other politicians.‘ (Broadcast by Spotlight 26 June 2026.)
produced one of the most important statements ever uttered about the reality of politics in Northern Ireland,
Baxter told Spotlight that in mid-July 2000, he observed Donaldson drunk, carrying two bottles of wine in Westminster and that he moved out to the Westminster Terrace, where he had his arms wrapped around two ladies. He believes the women were in their early twenties.
Jim Allister, leader of the TUV, raised the possibility that Donaldson was blackmailed by the state during an interview on Spotlight. Allister is someone who has been at the coal face of Loyalist politics for decades. If anyone knows how the game is really played, it is him. Even his most implacable opponents would agree that he has never compromised his principals about Loyalism – in the bear pit that is Northern Ireland politics, that is the same as saying he has never been compromised.
What is his take? I’ll return to that in a moment.
Many of his colleagues came to despise Donaldson. David Trimble MP, leader of the UUP, felt he was a manipulative back-stabber.
9. The police and MI5 do the right thing.
Donaldson’s actions eventually caught up with him.
I believe that Jon Boutcher, the current PSNI Chief Constable, is cut from a different cloth – certainly when it comes to child abuse cases – than that of many of his predecessors. In the past, the RUC would have covered up what a man like Donaldson did and passed the information to the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), so MI5 could blackmail the individual. This is what Kincora was all about. This is how Freddie Scappaticci was recruited. Scappaticci lusted after schoolgirls and watched pornography involving animals. Scappaticci eventually received a conviction for his collection of extreme pornographic images.
The current Director-General of MI5 did not intervene to halt the PSNI investigation into Donaldson either. It would be nice to think that this is purely down to a change in MI5’s character, but that would be too much to hope for. While that may be part of the story, even a significant part of it, other factors must have been at play. It is likely that MI5 did not have the stomach for a fight with Boutcher over the Donaldson scandal after decades of turmoil covering up the truth about countless other MI5 scandals in Northern Ireland. They include Scappaticci, the assassination of Patrick Finucane, collusion and, of course, Kincora – not to mention the Dublin-Monaghan bombings of 1974. MI5 must have realised that these scandals do not go away. They have resulted in multiple enquiries, including the one MI5 dreads most: the full-scale judicial enquiry. MI5 is facing one of those now in respect of its involvement in the murder of Patrick Finucane. Irrespective of the motive, it was a wise choice. Nobody is pointing a finger at MI5 for attempting to thwart the prosecution of Donaldson. They did the right thing this time around.
If Donaldson was blackmailed by MI5 at any time in the past, he may keep quiet about this in return for favourable treatment while he serves his sentence, and a possible early release. This being so, MI5 may be out of the woods.
10. The Leader of Unionism in Northern Ireland, a Convicted Paedophile.
On 22 June 2026, Sir Jeffrey was found guilty of eighteen historical sexual offences, including one count of rape and thirteen counts of indecent assault against two women when they were children. The abuse spanned twenty-three years.
His wife, Lady Eleanor Donaldson, was found guilty of aiding and abetting him in connection with five of these offences.
The abuse included kissing ‘Complainant A’ and forcing his tongue into her mouth when she was in primary school. He also put his hands up her top to grope her.
His second victim, Complainant B, was also in primary school when he raped her. He indecently assaulted her on nine occasions, including once in front of Lady Eleanor.
Instead of intervening, Lady Eleanor turned, walked away and pulled the door behind her.
On another occasion, he shone a light on the genitalia of one of the children.
The worst-case scenario for the DUP is that Donaldson was the victim of blackmail, or so afraid that MI5 knew of his sordid activities, that he did what the British government wanted him to do anyway.
Jim Allister MP of the TUV told the Irish News that information about Donaldson’s paedophilia and his known ‘risky lifestyle’ in London may have been used as leverage during negotiations ahead of the signing of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Did The Irish Times ever think this was a valid issue to investigate? If not, why not?
Allister has revealed that allegations that Donaldson abused children were in the ‘ether’ from March 2023, a full year before the former DUP leader was arrested.
Allister suggested that the intelligence services and ‘the very top of government would have been aware of that’.
‘And when you set that along the timeline of how Sir Jeffrey somersaulted from his opposition to the Protocol to (its) implementation of the Protocol, then it does beg questions,’ the TUV leader insists.
There is a precedent for this sort of machination: the Kincora Boys’ Home ‘honey trap’ operation run by MI5 and MI6.
Allister believed Donaldson was not acting as a true Unionist. Unfortunately, Donaldson was so deceitful, it is difficult to make head nor tail about his true beliefs relating to the most serious issue of his leadership of the DUP, the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP).
The Northern Ireland Protocol is part of the UK–EU Withdrawal Agreement negotiated after Brexit, and it governs Northern Ireland’s trade and regulatory alignment with the EU to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. Jeffrey Donaldson has opposed the protocol and linked his party’s refusal to rejoin the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive to its removal.
Bizarrely, he sent contradictory signals to London and Dublin during the NIP negotiations. Listen to what Jamie Bryson revealed to Stephen Nolan of BBC Radio NI.
For more on Bryson, go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Bryson
This story has many secrets yet to reveal. Mandy McAuley has let it be known her DMs are open.
This story is adapted from section 1 of ‘The DUP, God’s Soldiers’, which can be read by clicking this link: The DUP, God’s Soldiers. [WebBook]
Readers may also be interested in these stories:
See: The Mountbatten Dossier. [WebBook]
See: Kincora’s darkest secret.
