Mary Lou McDonald was narrating the plotline but it was Pearse Doherty’s face that told the whole astounding story of Sinn Féin’s pre-election implosion. Sitting in his chamber seat next to McDonald, the party’s bellicose deputy leader in the Dáil looked like a man who hadn’t slept for successive nights. Were he to present himself at an airline check-in desk with those bags under his eyes he would be charged for excess luggage. The Donegal TD’s demeanour during Tuesday’s Dáil statements on child protection was mirrored by rows of party colleagues as ashen-faced as a lotto syndicate who just discovered they burned their jackpot-winning ticket.
By contrast, McDonald gave no hint of defeat. For the leader of a party that has been deserted by six of its elected Oireachtas members, she sounded composed, unfazed and nothing like the politician fast gaining a reputation as the former future first woman taoiseach. On a personal level, her resilience was admirable. Her private life this past year has been harrowing, involving recovery from a hysterectomy, her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and the death of her father on Monday, July 29th, with whom, she has said, she had “a complicated relationship”.
The previous Friday, a party member had contacted Sinn Féin with an allegation about Brian Stanley, its Laois-Offaly TD and chairman of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee. Stanley has said he told McDonald on July 29th – the day her father died – that there was a complaint against him but he did not know its nature. On Friday, August 2nd, the complainant submitted a formal statement, thus commencing an internal inquiry.
In her interview with RTÉ’s Mary Wilson last Monday, McDonald said she did not inquire what the complaint was about when she was notified of it. She attended her father’s funeral and did a reading at the Mass later that week, on Tuesday, August 6th. Most workers would have been on bereavement leave at such a time and it is to her credit that she has not attempted to use her father’s death as an excuse for her lack of curiosity about the allegation against Stanley.
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At this point, it is necessary to clarify that I have not received any off-the-record briefing from or on behalf of Sinn Féin. In putting this timeline together, I have relied on Stanley and McDonald’s public statements and on Paddy McDonald’s death notice on rip.ie where the absence of his daughter’s name and those of her siblings appears to reflect the complexity of the familial relationships.
Nor has Stanley acknowledged McDonald’s mourning period in any of his statements. Since his resignation from the party last weekend, he has not explained why, as he asserts, Sinn Féin wanted to oust him in Laois-Offaly when the party was facing into a tough general election and his seat was considered secure. Nor has he explained why, if he believed Sinn Féin should have reported to gardaí the counter-allegation he made to the inquiry in September, he did not do so himself.
The blizzard of defections and scandals that has splattered the party since the Dáil returned from its summer holidays has been so unremitting that it’s hard to keep up. Were Sinn Féin not historically well disposed to Russia, one might suspect Kremlin dirty tricks at play.
First came the revelation that Seán Mag Uidhir, as the head of the party’s Northern Ireland press office, and his colleague, Caolán McGinley, gave the British Heart Foundation job references for their former colleague, convicted child sex offender Michael McMonagle, after he had been arrested and Sinn Féin had let him go when his contract expired. Next came the resignation of Patricia Ryan, the Kildare South TD whose biggest impact on the national consciousness was that she flew off on a sun holiday during the 2020 general election campaign. She joins the roll call of previous defectors that features Violet-Anne Wynne in Clare, who was sued for four years’ rent arrears owed for her social housing accommodation, as well as Peadar Tóibín and Carol Nolan, who both quit Sinn Féin in 2018 over its support for legal abortion access.
In an interview about her personal tribulations with Virgin Media’s TV AM last month, McDonald remarked that “life throws curveballs at you” and the curviest one of all has Niall Ó Donnghaile’s name written all over it.
If any of these scandals has the power to stop McDonald bursting through the 103-year-old glass ceiling and becoming taoiseach it is this one. Her effusive statement on O’Donnghaile’s resignation from the Seanad in 2023, three months after Sinn Féin had reported him to the PSNI for “inappropriate” texts to a 17-year-old boy, is a swinging noose for the leader’s ambitions. And she knows it.
During her Dáil statement, she struggled to pronounce the name of her party’s former Seanad leader from Belfast’s Short Strand. Sinn Féin’s failure to inform the Oireachtas for three months that Ó Donnghaile had left the party is awkward to explain, but it is the intangible aftershock that will prove most damaging. Voters tend to forget the finer details of political rumpuses but impressions endure, and the impression this creates is of a puppet leader whose strings are being pulled by unelected figures in the North, as has long been alleged by Sinn Féin’s rivals.
Having already lost the far-right electorate, Sinn Féin can kiss goodbye now too to recent converts and the undecideds who will flee this spectre.
This is McDonald’s GUBU, the acronym coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien, for the former leader of her old party, Fianna Fáil. Charlie Haughey never quite managed to shake off his reputation – along with his reputation for greed and corruption – as an unlucky politician, cursed by the arrest of double-murderer Malcolm Macarthur in his attorney general’s apartment. Perhaps, if she had stuck with Fianna Fáil, McDonald might now be its deputy leader, primed to succeed Micheál Martin as head of that other self-styled “Republican Party” and, possibly, as a history-making first woman taoiseach.