Mary Lou will always be shackled to Sinn Féin’s sectarian baggage

There was no getting over the oddness... of her being elected unopposed, writes Alison O’Connor

LET’S project forward a year.

For the purposes of this particular political fairytale it’s currently January 2019 and a recent general election

threw up a few surprises.

But after a while everything settled down. The new partners in Government appear to have gotten past the getting-to-know-you stage and settled into their respective roles.

In the end of year reviews it was generally acknowledged that Tánaiste Mary Lou McDonald had performed really well in 2018.

In the last 12 months she not only took over the leadership of her party, but successfully negotiated a coalition arrangement and landed the very senior role of deputy prime minister for herself.

Nobody, including those involved, quite believed this Government would come together, right up until the final moment. But it did.

There was no getting over the oddness, at the start of last year, of her being elected unopposed as the new leader of Sinn Féin, no matter how much the party protested that it had been open to anyone who wanted to go forward.

No less odd possibly than the fact that she replaced a leader who had been in situ for more than 30 years.

Mary Lou confirmed last January that she was “in the running myself”.

“I’m in this to win but by no means do I take it for granted,” she said.

She subsequently went through the motions of speaking at a series of regional debates organised by the party, being the sole candidate to address them.

At the time she managed to remain straightfaced when members of the media, clearly intent on stirring the pot, would ask her how the leadership “race” was going

. It’s a testimony to her composure, or perhaps the fact she’d been in Sinn Féin for so long, she would give a reply that betrayed no hint of irony.

The Mary Lou solo leadership hustings show drew much mirth on social media, but the party keyboard warriors were more than up to the task of hitting back.

The real surprise was Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil (take your pick, it doesn’t affect how the story ends) agreeing to go into coalition with Sinn Féin having fought shy of such a move for so long.

But the prospect of power does strange things to politicians, and as we witnessed they do a strong line in self justification when those seats around the Cabinet table are so tantalisingly within their grasp. After all with a new leader in place, after three decades of Gerry Adams, this was a new political dawn for Sinn Féin.

Mary Lou was the modern face of the party. She’s born and bred in Dublin, they reminded themselves, and now that Adams was gone she had far more freedom in how she conducted herself.

It was promising, after her election, how well she did on the issue of bullying which had beset Sinn Féin.

By the time she took over 22 public representatives had left the party, 10 vacated their seats, seven resigned, and five were expelled.

She established a clear narrative that bullying would not be tolerated and established open and transparent procedures surrounding such allegations, and how they should be handled.

Early on in her tenure she liberalised Sinn Féin’s position on abortion. Previously the party’s policy had allowed for terminations in cases of rape, incest, fatal foetal abnormalities, and where the health or mental health of the mother was at risk.

But ahead of the abortion referendum, which was held last May, she moved it in line with the findings of the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment, which recommended abortion without restrictions up to 12 weeks.

She also made it so that party members were given a free vote on the issue in line with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.

So while there was nothing radical in what she did, there was a definite sense of a loosening up.

It was felt that given time the party might cast off at least some of the reputation that it operated like a cult, and had no toleration of dissent.

But observers also wondered how far away had Gerry Adams really gone? How much was Mary Lou really to be trusted by the Belfast “hard men” who had kept such a tight rein on the party for so long?

There had always been the nervousness that even though Gerry Adams was no longer party leader in name he would remain on the sidelines pulling strings, despite him prissily denying such a notion prior to his stepping down.

He and McDonald have always been seen as close. The memory of her robust defence of Adams, when he was arrested and questioned in 2014 over the 1972 abduction, murder and disappearance of Belfast mother of 10 Jean McConville, remained.

The 20th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April did see Sinn Féin attempting to take on the legacy of peace, despite the absolute mess that was politics in the North then and now.

Funnily enough they carried it off with aplomb and it was this that made it all the easier for their senior coalition partner to take the step of going into Government with them after the October 2018 election.

In politics anything is possible and the positive economic picture made matters all the easier.

But then just after Christmas, at the beginning of 2019, only last week in fact, complications arose.

Sinn Féin MP Brian McBride (he’s makey-uppey) posted a video of himself clowning around in a convenience store with a packet of bagels which had the same name as the site of one of the most notorious IRA massacres in which 15 Protestants workers were killed.

The video was posted on the 45th anniversary of the shootings.

Unsurprisingly people have been appalled by the video. McBride has apologised for any hurt caused saying it was completely unintended.

Sinn Féin’s reaction earlier this week was to suspend McBride for three months on full pay.

On her way into the weekly Cabinet meeting this morning Tánaiste Ms McDonald made clear to the RTÉ reporter questioning her on the fallout from the tweet, and its implications for power sharing in the North, that she dislisked his line of questioning, accusing the station of having a “very strange agenda”.

She also described the McBride tweet as “crass”, “very stupid”, “objectionable” and “very hurtful” but said the three-month suspension was a “proportionate” response.

It was just the type of response that could so easily have been delivered by Gerry Adams.

You didn’t have to be a body language expert to see that her Cabinet colleague (pick A. Fine Gael’s Simon Coveney, or B. Fianna Fáil’s Lisa Chambers), standing alongside her, was exceptionally uncomfortable when asked about the controversy, and the mildness of the punishment.

The Minister, who had been one of those most reluctant to enter into the coalition arrangement with Sinn Féin, was clearly not inclined to believe that the McBride tweet lacked malice or that the three-month suspension was in any way adequate.

Ms McDonald brushed off the fact that the Taoiseach, who almost always stopped for a chat with reporters on the way into Cabinet, had earlier avoided this morning’s media scrum, a move suspected to be because of the McBride affair.

Nobody is rushing to say this tension between the Government partners cannot be sorted. But it has certainly re-opened the suspicions that Mary Lou McDonald remains shackled to the party’s past with all the sectarian baggage that involves.

The Coalition naysayers are sitting a little more smugly as they look on at developing events.