Marquess of Donegall is a title in the Peerage of Ireland held by the head of the Chichester family, originally from Devon, England.

[5][6] He died without male issue and was succeeded (in the earldom according to the special remainder) by his nephew Arthur Chichester, the second Earl.

Lord Donegall had previously represented County Donegal in the Irish House of Commons.

[11] John Chichester, second son of the first Viscount and father of the second Earl, represented Dungannon in the Irish House of Commons.

His wife Dehra was also a politician while their daughter, Marion Caroline Dehra, was the mother of the Baron Moyola, who served briefly as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and the politician Sir Robin Chichester-Clark and of the gardening writer and television presenter Penelope Hobhouse.

Joymount House was built for the 1st Baron Chichester in the 1610s in Carrickfergus in the south-east of County Antrim, probably being completed in 1618.

[19][20] The 2nd Marquess of Donegall, again during the early to mid-nineteenth-century, also maintained Fisherwick Lodge, a hunting 'lodge' near Doagh in County Antrim, on the family's country estate there.

This new Belfast Castle, a Victorian structure built in the 1860s,[22] was inherited by the 8th Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife in October 1883, thus passing out of the ownership of the Chichester family.

The house was sold by the seventh Marquess to chef Kevin Dundon, who converted it into a luxury hotel and restaurant in 1997.

Styled as Earl of Belfast from 1975 to April 2007, he was educated at Harrow School and the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, and was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards.

[24] Donegall is married to Caroline Philipson (born 1959), and they have two children:[24] They live near Arthurstown in the south-west of County Wexford.