NEWRY, Northern Ireland — The former leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, Jeffrey Donaldson, received a 15-year prison sentence Thursday for sexually abusing two schoolgirls and continuing for decades into their adulthood.

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 has been behind bars since June, when a jury found him guilty of 18 counts of sexually abusing the two women — identified in court only as Victim A and Victim B — when they were children. The listed offenses ran from 1985 to 2008.

Ramsey, addressing a packed Newry Crown Court, read from the two victims’ statements, which described abuse that began when they were 7 or 8 years old. One of the victims described recurring nightmares: “I wonder what it is like not to be afraid at night.”

The judge noted how Donaldson, who is appealing the conviction, had “doubled down on his denials” over what he called the veteran politician’s “catastrophic descent into disgrace.”

Donaldson’s former party, which denounced him immediately after his 2024 arrest and scrubbed him from the DUP website, said in a statement Thursday that Donaldson “deserves every day of the lengthy prison sentence he has to serve” for what it described as “vile and disgusting crimes.”

“Our first thoughts are again with the innocent victims who, having suffered such evil, were retraumatized through giving evidence at the trial. They deserve our compassion, support and respect,” the DUP statement said.

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 Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government in a bitter dispute over the region’s peculiar post-Brexit trade rules. Just weeks before his arrest, he again played a key role in reviving the coalition, the cornerstone of the Good Friday peace deal he had once rejected.

In March 2024, Donaldson was arrested in his secluded County Down home and charged alongside his wife, Eleanor. She was subsequently deemed by the Newry judge not mentally fit to stand trial on charges of aiding and abetting his crimes.

The U.K. government in July removed Donaldson from membership in the Privy Council, a body of parliamentary advisers to King Charles III. The king also stripped him of his knighthood.

Donaldson has been placed in an isolated hospital wing at Northern Ireland’s Maghaberry Prison, alongside other convicted sex offenders, to protect him from potential assaults from other prisoners. He reportedly is spending much of his days behind bars doing puzzles and reading the Bible.

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant rejected furious accusations from the U.K. region’s unionists Monday that he had “bent the knee” to Irish republicans blocking a long-disputed Protestant march.

Bryant told the House of Commons that his decision to ban what had been a legally authorized parade by the Orange Order — a pro-British Protestant brotherhood reviled by many of Northern Ireland’s Catholics — had been taken principally to avoid violence. Thousands led by Sinn Fein, the main Irish republican party, had spent nearly two weeks blocking the Orangemen’s intended path down the Garvaghy Road, the main Catholic district in the town of Portadown, but police kept the two sides apart.  

“The Orange Order obtained a legal right to parade, but … upholding the determination does not come at any cost. Upholding the law also means judiciously preventing serious disorder,” Bryant said in defense of his intervention Friday night.

Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Bryant of bowing to a threat of violence from Irish Republican Army militants who featured prominently within the Garvaghy Road crowd. Most IRA members have observed a cease-fire since 1997 and officially disarmed in 2005, but several small factions still plot occasional bomb and gun attacks.

Robinson said Northern Ireland’s unionists “know that this British government has bent the knee to them.”

But Bryant said his decision to bar the Orangemen — despite a decision last month by the region’s independent Parades Commission to permit a heavily restricted march by 35 Orangemen — had so far kept violence at bay.

“I utterly reject the charge that I have in any way succumbed to mob rule. The truth is, things have actually passed remarkably peacefully,” he said, adding: “I don’t think anybody seriously proposed that the police should drag people off the street.”

He spoke hours after two courts in Northern Ireland tangled with the conflict of rights stirred up by the revival of the Orange marching demands in Portadown, a sectarian dispute that triggered bloodshed and rioting across Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s.

The Court of Appeal, overseen by Northern Ireland’s highest judge, rejected a lawsuit by the Garvaghy Road protesters seeking to challenge the original Parades Commission ruling. Orange supporters said this judgment kept the door open for an eventual parade down Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997, when police backed by British soldiers forced the parade through with the use of armored vehicles and volleys of plastic bullets.

A separate Belfast High Court hearing gave the go-ahead for Portadown’s Orange lodge to pursue a legal challenge against both Bryant and Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. That case will be heard starting next Monday.

Boutcher, rejecting unionist calls for him to resign, issued his own lengthy defense of his officers’ management of the Portadown standoff. He appealed to both sides to respect a legal process that could take months to conclude — including potential charges against senior Sinn Féin figures involved in the Garvaghy Road blockade.

The legal fight over whose rights should prevail is fracturing Northern Ireland’s cross-community government, a bitterness on full display Monday night at Stormont, the center of government on a hill overlooking Belfast.

After a three-hour debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly, unionist members voted unanimously to oust the four Sinn Féin ministers from their supposed unity government. Unionists accused all four, led by First Minister Michelle O’Neill, of breaking their ministerial pledge to uphold the law of the land by joining and encouraging the Garvaghy Road protests.

O’Neill accused her accusers on the other side of the chamber of being reactionary bigots.

“It’s no surprise to me that the three unionist parties have signed up to this motion. They have never accepted the reality that an Irish republican is now the first minister, and a woman at that. They have never accepted equality,” she said.

The unionists’ motion of no confidence bore no legal weight because of Stormont’s peculiar power-sharing rules. This would have required Sinn Féin members to join the unionists in voting to punish their own leaders.

In the end, four motions — seeking the expulsion from office for a year of O’Neill, Finance Minister John O’Dowd, Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald and Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins — all failed on virtually identical sectarian tests. While 33 to 34 unionists voted to kick out each one, 35 lawmakers from Sinn Féin and a smaller Irish nationalist party, the SDLP, voted to keep them in office.

O’Neill’s official co-leader of Northern Ireland’s four-party government, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionists, said she understood the law as a barrister — and her government colleague had broken it by leading a “mob” that included well-known figures from multiple IRA factions “threatening violence and disorder.”

DUBLIN — The U.K. government has reversed a decision to permit a parade by Protestant hard-liners through a Catholic district in Northern Ireland, a U-turn that overjoyed Irish republicans and infuriated the region’s British unionists.

After a nearly two-week standoff in the predominantly Protestant town of Portadown, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant announced late Friday that the Orange Order would not be allowed to parade through the town’s main Catholic district for the first time in 28 years.

The Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal group reviled by many Catholics, had been barred from the route since 1998 following years of widespread violence triggered by the annual sectarian showdown.

“I call for all protests, rallies and demonstrations to be stood down. There is no excuse for a continued ratcheting up of tensions,” Bryant appealed in a statement explaining why he was reversing the original decision by the Parades Commission, Northern Ireland’s independent body for managing the region’s chronic conflicts over Orange Order demonstrations.

Street fighting over those traditional marches helped to trigger the onset of Northern Ireland’s three-decade conflict, known as “The Troubles,” which left nearly 3,700 dead before a 1998 peace accord.

Hundreds of Catholic locals backed by Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that leads Northern Ireland’s fraying cross-community government, gathered along the Garvaghy Road in Portadown to cheer the reversal.

First Minister Michelle O’Neill, who has been accused of breaking the law while helping locals block the Orangemen’s intended path since Sept. 27, went on Ireland’s flagship TV talk show, the Late Late Show, to express relief on behalf of the residents of Garvaghy Road.

“For the last 13 days they’ve been living with this constant fear and a cloud hanging over them that this unwanted sectarian march was going to be forced down that road,” she said.

But the main pro-British party in the coalition, the Democratic Unionists, denounced Bryant’s move as a capitulation to mob rule. Some DUP lawmakers called for Northern Ireland’s police chief, who had recommended the policy reversal, to be fired.

Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson said the U.K. government had sent a dangerous message that Northern Ireland “should be run on force of numbers and who shouts the loudest.”

Northern Ireland’s nearly three-decade system for managing conflict over parades “now lies in tatters,” he said, “and the rule of law has been fundamentally undermined.”

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