Jeffrey Donaldson: What happens now for former DUP leader convicted of child sex offences and wife Eleanor.
Following the guilty verdict being delivered by the jury at Newry Crown Court on Monday, Donaldson was immediately remanded into custody.
Eleanor and Jeffrey Donaldson.
By Staff Reporter
June 22, 2026 at 6:33pm BST
Former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson was taken straight to HMP Maghaberry on Monday following his conviction for historical sex offences against two child victims.
His wife, Eleanor Donaldson, was found to have aided and abetted his crimes, however she will not be held criminally responsible or face prison as she was ruled not medically fit to face trial.
The case has taken more than two years to reach a verdict after the husband and wife’s arrests for the offences in 2024.
What happens now for one of the most recognisable faces in Northern Ireland politics, and his wife?
When will Jeffrey Donaldson be sentenced?
Following the guilty verdict being delivered by the jury at Newry Crown Court on Monday, Donaldson was immediately remanded into custody.
He was taken from the court to a police van where he was transported to Maghaberry to begin his stint in prison.
Judge Paul Ramsey said the former politician can expect to receive a “lengthy” custodial sentence for his crimes.
However, that sentence is unlikely to be delivered for several months.
There will be a review hearing on September 11 before a pre-sentencing hearing on September 25 at the same court.
During sentencing, Judge Ramsey will consider aggravating and mitigating factors which may contribute to the length of the sentence Donaldson will receive.
The judge also said Donaldson would be placed on the sex offender register.
He is likely to be placed on a dedicated wing of the prison for sex offenders, which sits within the Lagan Valley constituency he used to represent as an MP.
What happens now for Eleanor Donaldson?
Eleanor Donaldson, 60, has been found to have aided and abetted her husband in sex abuse, but was ruled unfit to stand trial.
Rather than face the conventional criminal process, she has been subject to what is known as a ‘trial of the facts’.
This is a separate procedure in which the jury assesses the evidence to determine whether she carried out the acts alleged, but cannot return a guilty verdict and cannot impose any criminal conviction.
Having been found by the jury to have committed the acts, the case passes to the judge, who must choose from a limited number of options as set out in law.
These include a hospital order, under which she could be detained indefinitely subject to review by the Mental Health Review Tribunal; a guardianship order, placing her in the care of a nominated individual; or a supervision and treatment order requiring her to undertake specified medical treatment.
If none of those disposals is deemed appropriate — for instance, if medical professionals do not recommend detention or supervision — the only remaining option is an absolute discharge, where she would essentially walk free.
Will they lose their titles?
In mere minutes following the guilty verdict being delivered on Monday, calls were made by some politicians in Northern Ireland for the Donaldsons to lose their titles of ‘Sir’ and ‘Lady’.
Donaldson holds the title ‘Sir’ after being awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2016, while his wife Eleanor holds the title of ‘Lady’ as a result.
Whitehall sources told The Irish News that anyone convicted of a sexual offence would be considered for forfeiture of their honour, as would a person found to have committed such an act following a ‘trial of the facts’.
The decision will rest with the Honours Forfeiture Committee, a Cabinet Office body that advises the King on whether honours should be withdrawn.
Keir Starmer has resigned as British Prime Minister and leader of the British Labour Party.
In a statement outside 10 Downing Street, Starmer said he will do everything he can to ensure an orderly handover of power, and will give his successor his full support.
He claimed every decision he made in office has been about “putting the country I love first”.
Starmer said that after leaving the “biggest job in the country” he will spend more time on “the most important job”.
“Being the best husband I can, to my fantastic wife Vic, who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad, and being the best dad that I can to my beautiful children, who are my pride and joy.”
Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory at the 2024 general election, with the largest Labour majority in a generation, ending fourteen years of Conservative government and becoming the first Labour prime minister since Gordon Brown.
But he will go down in history as statistically the worst ever British Prime Minister, his decline in public support making him the most unpopular since records began.
His reign was bracketed by two shocking acts which exposed the puppet-like nature of his administration — the appointment of his US ambassador, Peter Mandelson, for whom it emerged he had breached security protocols, despite being aware of his ties to an Israeli-run ‘elite’ paedophile ring.
The pre-announcement yesterday of his resignation by US President Donald Trump was a telling humiliation, the former host of ‘The Apprentice’ TV show appearing to deliver the final blow by offering his own obituary on Mandelson’s premiership.
In fact, Starmer’s resignation had been predicted since Labour’s disastrous result in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, but it was another by-election that would ensure his departure – in Makerfield last week, his likely successor, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, was comfortably elected as an MP to allow him to take over the helm as British Prime Minister.
Long a supporter, Starmer’s unwavering defence of Israel was the primary reason for his downfall. His overt defence of the deliberate starvation of Palestinians, as well as his more secretive provision of RAF support for the physical bombardment of Gaza, will be examined in future investigations into the genocide. His imprisonment of Palestine activists as ‘terrorists’ has also wrecked British civil liberties and sharply contrasted with his previous employment as a human rights lawyer and barrister.
However, the collapse in support for his party has allowed for a major transformation in British politics and may offer his most enduring legacy. It has seen the rise of the Green Party to become the main contender on the left for the formation of the next British government, and has driven support for Scottish and Welsh nationalism to once again place the future of the union at the heart of British politics.
Sinn Féin has not yet commented on the development, but in a social media post, Matthew O’Toole, SDLP leader of the opposition at Stormont, noted there will have been seven British Prime Ministers in less than a decade.
“The UK is now a poorer and less stable country, which means conversations about constitutional change are not simply nationalist aspiration, but an understandable reaction to the real destabilisation of the British state,” he wrote.
“That instability and economic underperdormance affects so much that it is natural to explore change.”
Making journalism about the criminal justice system accessible to the people impacted by it is a core part of The Marshall Project’s mission. In our free print publication, News Inside, and our award-winning video series, Inside Story, both distributed to hundreds of prisons and jails across the U.S., we make our reporting available to incarcerated readers. But readers behind bars — and their loved ones — need more than just hard news. With features like Reader to Reader, a News Inside column built around advice and insights by and for justice-impacted people, we offer incarcerated readers a place to share peer-to-peer guidance on the challenges of prison life.
Now we’re bringing this forum for sharing knowledge and connection beyond News Inside, to a wider audience. This Father’s Day, The Marshall Project is launching “Sending Kites,” a new monthly column that explores different challenges faced by people with incarcerated loved ones. “Kites” is a prison term for letters or notes passed between people on the inside. Our newsroom corresponds with thousands of incarcerated people, many of whom share advice and reflections from their own lives. Every month, “Sending Kites” will draw from those experiences — and from families living these realities firsthand — to share practical ideas, creative solutions and guidance from inside prison walls.
Sending Kites: Parenting in Prison
We’re starting “Sending Kites” with the topic of parenting from prison. While this column is launching close to Father’s Day, it’s about the broader challenges mothers, fathers and other caregivers face when they try to stay present in their children’s lives from behind bars. As you’ll see in the responses, many parents behind bars fight to stay present. They call, write, pray and send artwork. They try to share and teach life lessons from their cells and find creative ways to guide their children through milestones and decisions from afar. Their experiences are about persistence as much as love, and finding ways to be there for their children, even when “being there” looks different for them.
“Sending Kites” will be published monthly on our website, where we’ll invite readers with personal experience of the criminal justice system to write in with their own experiences. You can also follow “Sending Kites” in your inbox; sign up today to get each edition as a monthly email newsletter.
W.B. Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree” reveals an unexpected American thread.
W. B. Yeats’ beloved poem is steeped in Irish nationalism, but its roots reach across the Atlantic to ideas of self-reliance, freedom, and cultural identity.
Maura Logue Contributor @IrishCentralJun 14, 2026
A young William Butler Yeats.
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” may be one of the most memorized poems in the Irish canon, yet beneath its dreamy Irish landscape lies a striking connection to America. From Thoreau and Emerson to the Irish diaspora and Yeats’ own nationalist vision, the poem carries echoes of both sides of the Atlantic.
W. B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: a poem so thoroughly Irish, yet with roots firmly planted in America. This poem about self-reliance, the beauty of nature, and the celebration of the land of Ireland seems simple — simple enough for generations of schoolchildren to memorize and recite. However, examining just one dimension of its nationalist theme reveals multiple connections to America. This poem shows unexpected, deep connections among the American experience, the Irish diaspora, natural and Celtic imagery, and Yeats’ nationalist ambitions for Ireland.
Before Ireland was officially its own country, when Irish immigrants in the United States were required to list “Great Britain” as their place of birth on passenger ship records and U.S. census reports, Yeats’ writings about Ireland had to be similarly nebulous. But this didn’t stop the young Yeats from pursuing his goal: expressing the values of Irish identity to help create the nation.
Among his earliest poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was printed in his 1893 volume The Rose. This poem was inspired by John Butler Yeats’ reading of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to “Willie” when he was a young boy, and more immediately, by the tinkling of a fountain that the grown-up W. B. heard in a London shop window. The imagery in this poem is dreamy, twilit, and otherwise “Celtic,” yet other components of the poem make it stand out as a work that moves toward articulating a nascent national identity, parallel to the motives and ideas that animate the American experience.
First, we can’t ignore the title! Literally translated, the title island, in English, is “Island of Heather” (“Inish” = “Island,” “Fraoigh” = “Heather”); however, Yeats was certainly aware of a primarily Anglophone audience’s tendency to hear and see “free island” in the title.
Second, the poem’s rhythm and meter are natural and free, not adhering to standard, traditional guidelines for poetic form, as Jahan Ramazani notes. The poem flows naturally, as if spoken by someone who is aspirationally laying out his plans to return to nature, to an unspoiled life, unmarred by the dirtiness of modern civilization. Freedom in form, liberty in expression, expansive in imagination. Are we describing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes — or Yeats?
Third, the retreatant speaking in the poem hopes to be self-sufficient on the island. And he has plans to make this happen! Today, we might say he’s avant-garde in his environmental awareness, desiring to build an eco-friendly abode and live on a sustainable microfarm, in harmony with the beans and the bees. Self-reliance is the name of the game; he will both go back to his roots and create something new.
Fourth, the speaker in the poem echoes the declaration of the Prodigal Son, in the well-known parable, “I will arise, and will go” (Luke 15:18), as the Innisfree speaker plans his homecoming to the island: “I will arise and go now.” The speaker’s resolve to “arise and go” appears twice in the poem: in the oft-recited first line, and in the first line of the final stanza. The poem ends with this individual giving us the most concrete reference yet to his placement on the pavement, as he “stand[s] on the roadway, or on the pavements grey.” The island is always present to him, but only in a dream. He cannot combine the real and imagined worlds; he must live in one and only long for the other.
I think it is significant to note that in the decades when this poem was written and first published, not only was the Irish cultural revival taking hold in Ireland itself, but its flames were being fanned by the Irish in America. Irish language classes and cultural societies had already gained a strong foothold by this time, following bold and grand schemes such as the Fenian Raids in Canada just a few years earlier. Perhaps Americans of Irish birth and descent would no longer be prodigal—the success of willing an Irish nation into existence would rely on buy-in from all its constituents, at home and abroad. Would they answer the call to arise and go?
Since this poem is based on a Walden-like notion, it is clear that the speaker seeks some sort of independence (the American impulse) and to forge his own path, in defiance of flawed contemporary conventions. The nationalistic references in this poem are coded, possibly because at this time, the nascent nation was so amorphous that being any more specific would have caused Yeats to fail in the expression of a universally Irish ideal.
But the seed was planted, and the bean rows would grow.
An American impulse, transformed by the Irish spirit. A masterful expression of the desire for freedom and a return to authenticity. Hopes and dreams, plans and action. The best of both sides of the Atlantic, all in a 12-line poem.
