RIP Laura Buckley Noonan
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06 Sept 2025
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06 Sept 2025
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Keir Starmer playing football with a Donegal training top he got back in 2007
While the new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s been on his first visit to Ireland today, Donegal is a place he has close to his heart.
Starmer entered Downing Street as Labour's first prime minister in 14 years after a landslide victory at the general election and has met Stormont First Minister Michelle O’Neill and deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly.
Before Euro 2020, which was played 12 months later due to the pandemic, Starmer posted a photo on what was then called Twitter, saying: "Finally back in training! Still got a few months before Gareth Southgate announces the squad for the Euros..."
The photo showed Starmer wearing a Donegal training top. He later revealed that the top he was pictured in was bought whilst on honeymoon with his then-new wife Victoria in Ireland back in 2007.
A regular interviewer of Starmer from a previous role as a human rights adviser to the PSNI, is Enda McClafferty, the political editor of BBC Northern Ireland who is originally from Downings and now lives in St Johnston.
He told DonegalLive: "Mr Starmer told me he loves Donegal and when he worked in Northern Ireland, he used to spend weekends in Donegal with his wife. I’ve interviewed him several times and most recently at Grianian Fort in Burt where we stood sheltering from the rain and had a long chat about his love for Donegal."
Starmer remembered the people of Creeslough the year before last during the Prime Minister’s Questions in the British House of Commons.
“I want to send my heartfelt condolences to the families of all those who lost their lives in Creeslough last week," Starmer said in October 2022 following the tragedy at Creeslough, where 10 people died following an explosion at the local service station. "Donegal is a special place to me and my family and across this house. The people there are in all of our thoughts."
Twenty-seven years ago, there was an even stronger Donegal connection to a Labour prime minister. Back in May 1997, the Donegal Democrat said Tony Blair's ''maternal grandmother, Sally Corscadden (nee Lipsett), was born on the winding banks of the Erne'' in Ballyshannon.
Blair's grandfather came from nearby Carricknahorna, and these grandparents moved to Glasgow where his mother Hazel was born and the family, with young Blair in tow, were frequent visitors for summer holidays to Ballyshannon.
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