Mick Clifford: A lot of Sinn Féin people didn't know about Michael McMonagle
Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill at the Sinn Féin ard fheis. Ms O’Neill said she was 'aghast and horrified' about references given to Michael McMonagle. Picture: Niall Carson/PA
Plausible deniability is a standard feature of politics. It involves the capacity of politicians or officials to deny knowledge or responsibility for a particular matter.
Right now there is plenty of plausible deniability within the Sinn Féin party. An awful lot of people apparently didn’t know something about a deadly serious matter that most outside the political — and even party — bubble would have assumed was common knowledge within it.
In August 2021, Sinn Féin press officer Michael McMonagle was arrested by the PSNI and questioned over alleged child sex abuse offences. He was immediately suspended by the party and his membership cancelled.
McMonagle had to have been a familiar face among the party’s hierarchy. He had been employed as a press officer since 2014. After two years he was sent to work at the party offices in London and Brussels and he returned to Belfast in 2019. Thereafter he worked at the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Three months after his suspension, McMonagle was supplied with professional references from two of his former colleagues in the party press office. Seán Mag Uidhir — his surname is the Irish version of Maguire — and Caolán McGinley gave the references. Is it not plausible that they were unaware of the reason for their former colleague’s suspension.
Mag Uidhir was the head of Sinn Fein’s press in the North and a hugely influential figure. He is a former IRA man who served eight years of a 16-year sentence in the 1970s. He was active when the IRA and Sinn Féin believed that the governments north and south of the border were illegitimate and had to be violently removed.
Some observers persist in the opinion that this moral positioning, in which the party’s interests can supersede laws in either of the two states on this island, did not completely dissipate after the Good Friday Agreement.
Anyway, in September 2022, over a year after his arrest, Michael McMonagle was employed by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) on foot of the two references from his former colleagues. The following February, he was back at Stormont with the BHF, which was lobbying for a change in the law on organ donation.
It would have been difficult to miss him as he was carrying a banner at the event. The BHF was accompanied by six-year-old Dáithí MacGabhann, who needed a transplant, and Dáithí's family.
A number of photographs have emerged from the occasion in which Michelle O’Neill is in the vicinity of McMonagle. Certainly, she could plausibly deny that she saw him that day.
On an occasion when politicians and party officials naturally want to be associated with a particular campaign, it beggars belief that nobody in Sinn Féin set eyes on their former colleague.
Certainly, each individual official or politician in the party who was in Stormont that day could plausibly deny that they saw him. However, if somebody did see or engage with him, nothing came of it. If somebody asked a question or two further up the chain of command, it didn’t go anywhere.
In July 2023, the identified McMonagle as being the subject of a child abuse investigation. He was immediately removed from the BHF. It is unclear whether, or at what point, the BHF contacted Sinn Féin to ask what they had known about this individual who had been given the all-clear by two party press officers.
The following month, McMonagle was charged with a range of offences.
Roll forward a year. On September 23, McMonagle pleaded guilty to a number of charges. He is due to be sentenced next month. Six days after his court appearance, the Sinn Féin ard fheis took place in Athlone.
The following day it emerged that the two press officers, Mag Uidhir and McGinley, had resigned in the course of a disciplinary process. Leading Sinn Féin MLA Connor Murphy has said the party only found out about the references last week.
Everybody in the party could plausibly deny that such knowledge was acquired at any time in the last 15 months since McMonagle’s employment at BHF was publicly revealed.
In an interview with the BBC, Murphy said that once McMonagle was suspended, the party’s engagement with him ended.
“It is not our job to do the investigation,” he said. “To do anything in relation to that could potentially be prejudicial. It is up to the police to gather sufficient evidence to decide to charge him.”
That statement is, to put it at its most charitable, wholly inaccurate. If the party at any level became aware of McMonagle’s employment in a position where he had access to children they would have been as morally obliged as any citizen to draw attention to it.
On Wednesday, Michelle O’Neill said she was “aghast and horrified” about the references that had been given to McMonagle.
“I know I discharged my duty… Whenever this came to my attention last Wednesday that both individuals had provided references, I took immediate action,” she said. She did not, she says, see him that day in Stormont.
What emerges is a picture of Sinn Féin in which nobody, with the possible exception of the two press officers, saw McMonagle at Stormont; nobody knew he was employed by the BHF; nobody therefore wondered how a man under investigation for child sexual abuse could have such a position.
In July 2023, nobody was curious about whether the party had anything to do with his employment at the BHF. Nobody in a party with a reputation for astute media and political operations asked Mag Uidhir, the top spin doctor, whether there were any red flags associated with McMonagle.
Nobody knew anything and there is a basis for perfectly plausible deniability to that effect.
What is undeniable is that Sinn Féin has a record, stretching back to the days when it supported killing for a united Ireland, of dealing differently to other political parties with internal matters. Since committing to exclusively political means, that has changed somewhat.
The party today has legions of members and employees who are focused primarily on social improvement in a manner that is typical of other political parties. But 26 years after the Good Friday Agreement there are, now and again, uncomfortable reminders that at a corporate or organisational level within Sinn Féin, the past hasn’t completely gone away.
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