Source: Politico
“The former leader of [British-occupied] Ireland’s main pro-British party, Jeffrey Donaldson, received a 15-year prison sentence Thursday for sexually abusing two schoolgirls. Donaldson, 63, kept his hands clasped together but offered no visible reaction as Judge Paul Ramsey said the former Democratic Unionist Party leader must serve an 11-year sentence for raping one girl and a further 4-year term for sexually abusing another. … Donaldson was an MP representing Lagan Valley from 1997 to 2024, first for the moderate Ulster Unionist Party and then — after belatedly breaking with the party over its support for the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 — as a member of the hard-line DUP. Donaldson became DUP leader in 2021, when he oversaw the collapse of [occupied] Ireland’s power-sharing government in a bitter dispute over the region’s peculiar post-Brexit trade rules.” (10/15/26)