I’ve known Donaldson since the 1980s when I was a Sunday News journalist sent to report on his speech to the annual Young Unionist conference in Belfast, the youth wing of the UUP.
There are many, many media folk, Unionists and Christians across the Province who will have their own memories and experiences of meeting and chatting to Donaldson. I fall into all three categories.
Primarily, our thoughts and prayers must be with the two women victims - known in the trial as Complainant A and Complainant B - who bravely explained their horrific experiences at the hands of Donaldson.
Given the abuse I suffered as a teenage Presbyterian minister’s son in the Seventies in the heartland of the north east Ulster Bible Belt and my time in journalism, I thought that nothing can shock me any more. I was wrong.
The Donaldson verdicts from the jury - guilty on all counts - truly gobsmacked me. I genuinely never saw that coming.
Like the horror movie, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, about the two characters in the same person, I’ve had to come to terms with the two Jeffrey Donaldsons - the polished Christian politician, and the evil convicted sex offender. Over the decades, I only knew the former. Never once did I suspect the latter.
It has taken me back to the mid 1990s and my time living in the Lagan Valley constituency. The then UUP MP Jim Molyneaux had revealed he would not be contesting the seat at the next General Election, a seat he had held since its creation in 1983. Lagan Valley then was a safe UUP stronghold.
There was much talk in the UUP association as to who would succeed Molyneaux for the party’s nomination for Westminster. Donaldson told me he would be seeking the nomination, but at that time, he was not the association’s favourite to be the UUP candidate.
In those early months prior to the crucial selection meeting, the hot favourite to win the nomination was established Lisburn UUP councillor David Campbell, later to become a leading figure in First Minister Lord Trimble’s Stormont team and a chairman of the Loyalist Communities Council.
I was part of the Donaldson team. We called ourselves The Westminster Club. Our primary aim was to secure that nomination for Donaldson against the odds.
Even in my own local UUP branch (I’ll leave the debate about journalists being members of political parties for another day!), I was definitely in the minority as members were solidly behind Campbell as Donaldson was still seen as a ‘blow in’ from South Down.
It was the evening of the selection by the Lagan Valley UUP association and as folk took their seats in a packed Orange hall, the figures still showed the voting would be very tight. My role was simple. Get a seat directly in front of the chairman - veteran UUP councillor Jim Dillon - and when it came question time, jump up and ask Campbell a hard-hitting question.
I listened intently to Campbell’s well-polished and effectively delivered speech for any loopholes. Campbell expertly outlined his agenda if he won the nomination. Then question time. I was the first on my feet. Chairman Dillon saw me and gave me the floor.
I told Campbell I was a radical Right-wing Unionist and his speech smacked of compromise and surrender. Could he give me a guarantee that he would not follow a liberal agenda! The look he gave me showed he was clearly rattled by my remark.
Then came Donaldson’s turn. Again, another well-presented speech. Question time; up I got again with a question Donaldson and I had pre-prepared. It all had the desired effect. Donaldson won the nomination against the tide.
Some Campbell supporters were furious with me. One told me that radical Right-wingers like me should be in jail. Decades later as the verdicts of the Donaldson trial sink in, the irony of that quip has not been lost on me.
At the time of that selection meeting, the Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue was in existence - the forerunner to the Stormont Assembly. My late dad, Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, was then Ulster Unionist Party Chief Whip.
A few days after the selection victory, Donaldson, dad and myself had lunch together at the Forum cafeteria. That was when Donaldson made his remark that I had hit Campbell with an Exocet with my question.
What was also memorable about that lunch meeting was not so much the comparison with me to the Exocet, but the fact that all three of us were wearing the so-called Fish lapel badge, a symbol that all of us were born again Christians according to the New Testament text of St John Chapter 3 and verse 16.
The Fish was a symbol of how the early Christians identified themselves. As Donaldson rose through the political and Loyal Order ranks, his Fish buttonhole badge became a trade mark symbol of his Christian faith. Even during the weeks of his trial, as he arrived at court each morning, his lapel would sport the Fish badge.
I wore my Fish badge for many years. I stopped wearing it the day Donaldson was first charged in 2024. I have not worn it since. And therein lies the dilemma for the broad Christian Church.
While we must never ever forget Donaldson’s victims and the heinous trauma they endured and continue to live with, the challenge for the Christian Churches is how they reclaim the Fish badge specifically and how to undo the image damage done to the Christian faith generally by Donaldson’s conviction.
During his many years in the political spotlight, Donaldson regularly highlighted his Christian faith. But many of us never knew the real Donaldson until the guilty verdicts were delivered at Newry court house.
The bitter fallout from the Donaldson verdict is the indelible stain which has fallen on the Christian faith. Could I wear my Fish badge in public without someone making a joke or jibe about Donaldson?
The challenge facing the Christian faith in the coming weeks and months was best summed up to me by a former born again Christian man turned atheist referring to the Donaldson verdict and his expose as a convicted sex offender - ‘they walk among us!’
Put bluntly, how many folk will not want anything to do with Christianity or the Church because of the Donaldson conviction? Ironically, for how many people will the words of the late Indian Hindu nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi ring true - ‘I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.’
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| Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. |
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