Jeffrey Donaldson, who resigned as leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party on Friday, has spent his career defending the political union between Britain and the six-county statelet where he was born 61 years ago.
Northern Ireland’s longest-serving member of Parliament, he has been present at most of the pivotal moments in its recent political history. His sudden resignation, after being charged with non-recent sexual offenses on Thursday, has upended the status quo in Northern Ireland and raised questions about the future direction of the Democratic Unionist Party, or D.U.P.
Michelle O’Neill, the first minister of Northern Ireland, said on Friday that the charges against Mr. Donaldson were “now a matter for the criminal justice system” and added that her priority was to “provide the leadership the public expect and deserve, and to ensure the four-party executive coalition delivers for the whole of our community now and in the future.”
Here’s what to know about Mr. Donaldson’s career and his impact on politics in the region.
His route to power.
Born in Kilkeel, a County Down fishing and farming village that is within sight — across a narrow sea inlet — of the independent Republic of Ireland, Mr. Donaldson was the eldest of five boys and three girls.
In 1970, during the period of sectarian violence between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists known as the Troubles, his cousin Samuel Donaldson was killed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army while serving in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, an event that Mr. Donaldson would later say “shattered” his childhood.
He joined the Orange Order, a Protestants-only religious and cultural group, at age 16, and two years later enlisted in the Ulster Defense Regiment, a heavily Protestant part-time militia unit of the British Army that was deeply engaged in the Troubles.
He entered public life at age 20, working for Enoch Powell, a conservative English politician notorious for his racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. By the 1970s, Mr. Powell had moved to Northern Ireland to become a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, winning a Westminster seat in Mr. Donaldson’s native South Down constituency.
While working as Mr. Powell’s election agent, Mr. Donaldson joined the Ulster Unionist Party, or U.U.P., and at age 22 was elected as a member of a short-lived precursor to the present Northern Ireland Assembly. He subsequently became an aide to then U.U.P. leader, James Molyneaux, and successfully contested Molyneaux’s Lagan Valley seat in the Westminster Parliament after Mr. Molyneaux retired from politics in 1997.
He has played a role in Northern Ireland’s politics for four decades.
A skilled debater, Mr. Donaldson has, in over 40 years in public life, demonstrated an ability to stake out bold positions, informed by a staunch unionist ideology, and then, when circumstances change, to move on from them.
In 1997, when he was first elected to the London Parliament as a member of the D.U.P.’s main rival, the U.U.P., a confidential profile prepared for the British authorities noted his links to Mr. Powell. But it added that Mr. Donaldson had gained a reputation, during 1992 talks aimed at ending the bloody Troubles, “as being one of the more liberal members of the U.U.P. team. Since then his stance has been less easy to pin down.”
The following year, as the world watched, Mr. Donaldson led a group of U.U.P. negotiators who defied their party leader, David Trimble, and walked out of the last day of the historic Good Friday peace talks, saying that the power-sharing deal — signed later that day — gave too much ground to the Irish Republican Army, which had led a violent 30 year armed struggle to reunify the island of Ireland.
Despite this rejectionist position, Mr. Donaldson remained in the Ulster Unionists for another five years, often sparring with Mr. Trimble. Then, in 2003, he defected to the more hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, which still held out against the Good Friday Agreement.
His defection came a month after assembly elections in which the D.U.P. overtook the Ulster Unionists for the first time, thanks to dissatisfaction with the Good Friday Agreement among many in the Protestant, unionist community from which both drew their support. Coming only a month after Mr. Donaldson had retained his seat as an Ulster Unionist candidate, the defection caused lasting bitterness in unionist politics.
In 2007 circumstances changed, and Mr. Donaldson also altered course. Following talks in Scotland, the D.U.P.’s veteran founder and leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, ended his opposition to the Good Friday Agreement, and the D.U.P. went into coalition, in Belfast’s devolved assembly, with Sinn Fein, formerly the political wing of the I.R.A. Mr. Donaldson, while keeping his seat in the London parliament, was also a member of the power-sharing Belfast assembly, where he served for a year as a junior minister.
His time as leader of the D.U.P. was dominated by his response to Brexit.
In 2021 he became D.U.P. leader after infighting brought down its two previous leaders, Arlene Foster and Edwin Poots, within weeks of each other.
Although Northern Ireland had voted, overall, to remain in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, Mr. Donaldson, leading the D.U.P. from Westminster, aligned unionism with the most hard-line Brexit faction in the British Conservative Party. Led by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, this group wanted a complete withdrawal from all European Union institutions, including customs, manufacturing, environmental and veterinary protocols that allowed free trade and movement across the Irish border.
In Ireland, and abroad, a frictionless Irish border was widely seen as essential to preserving the peaceful status quo that followed the Good Friday Agreement. So when the U.K. government agreed, under heavy pressure from the E.U. and the United States, to impose customs and trade checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, rather than on the Irish border, Mr. Donaldson protested by using the D.U.P.’s power-sharing veto to collapse the devolved government in Northern Ireland in 2022.
After two years of Northern Ireland having no functioning government, and with his party losing support to hard-liners and moderates on either side, Mr. Donaldson finally agreed to revive the assembly in January this year.
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