A reliance on a version of Christian dogma by Davey and Linda Hoy, founders of the Armoy Christian Centre, led to Jeffrey Donaldson being able to escape justice for decades. They “facilitated” a meeting between him and a woman he abused and did not report him to the police.  This is not just an issue for fringe Christian groups. The Revolutionary Communist Party’s article on the paedophile and rapist is a Marxist mirror image of the Hoys’ approach. Instead of pieties about sin, repentance and forgiveness it uses declamatory class hatred as a way of avoiding examining precisely what happened, why it happened and how a high-profile public figure is likely to spend a very long time in prison. 

A big part of Donaldson’s public persona was that he practises a very illiberal version of Presbyterianism.  A survivor met with Dr Jacqui Montgomery-Devlin, safeguarding lead of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and a senior police officer when she decided that she wanted Donaldson to pay for his crimes and felt that she was able to take part in the legal process. The Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is a very small place, arrested him and seem to have done an impeccable job in gathering evidence against him. In this instance the police did what you would want them to do. Unlike the evangelical amateurs, the Presbyterian Church behaved as you would expect a responsible organisation to do.

These facts do not fit neatly with a cartoonish Marxist understanding of the police and organised religion, but a serious account must include them.

Reading the article would lead you to conclude that rape and child abuse are crimes only committed by the rich and powerful. The reality is that these things happen everywhere in all social classes and revolutionary organisations are no different. The Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Revolutionary Party both went to great lengths to protect men accused of serious sexual offences. Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund refers to men forcing themselves on women comrades.

Senior DUP people concealed the truth about Donaldson

From the information that is currently in the public domain, it seems that they only people who knew about Donaldson’s rapes and paedophilia were him, his wife, the survivors and perhaps his Christian amateur “counsellors”. This was not the same as the Kincora children’s home where it is well documented that senior members of the British and Irish ruling classes were raping children with the full knowledge of the British state. My review of a distressing book on the case by Chris Moore, a former BBC journalist, is here.

While there is currently no reason to doubt the word of senior DUP members who say they were unaware of the offences for which Donaldson is now serving time, their attempts to disassociate themselves from him reveal that he was long known to be a prolific sexual harasser, a drunk and had gay and straight affairs while posing as a model of Christian virtue. The DUP leader admits this, saying “information that was not reported through our appropriate channels and therefore information about which we could do nothing formally.”

Anyone who has spent time in a political organisation knows that there will be times when members do things which are not criminal but do put the party or group at risk. When you go on TV one day and compare gay people to the Shankhill butchers murder gang and on another are seen by police entering a gay sauna in London, the mismatch between political beliefs and your personal life makes you unfit to be a public representative. People voted for Boris Johnson who made no secret of his extramarital relationships. Donaldson and the DUP had to lie and conceal the truth to get him elected.

Sinn Féin have been saying all the things you would expect them to say, but just as the variants of revolutionary Marxism practised by the SWP and WRP did not make them immune to sexual assaults, the Republican Movement’s historic leadership gave the known abuser, pervert and paedophile Freddie Scappaticci the lead role in its unit responsible for identifying, torturing and killing informers and people who were falsely accused of being informers. To my knowledge, there has been no public accounting of that.

There are similarities between how senior DUP members stayed mute about Donaldson’s non-criminal behaviour and how the SWP and WRP dealt with Delta and Healey. Simon Pirani offers his reflections on the WRP here.

In all three cases parts of the leadership decided that protecting the organisation meant protecting the man.

The RCP piece concludes with the resounding assertion, a version of which is the punchline to every RCP article: “This is not about a single man, nor party. It is this whole sick system that needs to be overthrown.”

As a guideline to working out how political organisations, whether Marxist or far right like the DUP, to say nothing of schools, football clubs, union branches should deal with abusers that is worse than useless. A version of that thinking led the SWP to set up a ludicrous revolutionary tribunal when they should simply have supported survivors to go to the police.

Dogma, whether Marxist or Christian, is no protection against powerful men in male dominated organisation who are willing to see women as collateral damage in the interests of a “revolutionary morality” or electoral necessity.