Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has spoken about her husband’s cancer diagnosis for the first time, describing a “very eventful and a very tough year”.
In an interview on Virgin Media TV’s Ireland AM, she said her husband Martin Lanigan was diagnosed with colorectal cancer during a family trip to France.
“Life just throws curveballs at you and, in my case, several of them happened at one time,” she said, describing how she herself had only just recovered from a hysterectomy in June 2023.
“Thank God I had recovered really well from that. I thought, great, here we go. We went on a short family break, and literally between packing the case to come home and arriving at the airport, Martin got really, really sick,” she said.
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It was “one of those moments in life where literally everything got turned upside down”, but his prognosis is now positive.
“We buried my father five weeks ago. So anybody who has lost their dad knows that’s a very hard thing. It’s a complete game-changer,” she said, adding: “I’m doing okay”.
Mr McDonald died “peacefully in the wonderful care of Caritas Nursing Home on Merrion Road” on July 29th, according to his death notice on RIP.ie.
The past year had been “very eventful and very tough,” she said. “Sometimes that just happens in life, right? You know, one thing happens and then another thing happens.”
Asked about the general election and the threat of the far right to Sinn Féin’s hopes of forming a government , Ms McDonald said: “I think the concern [is] around the very small number of toxic agitators who don’t really care about communities . . . I think they need to be faced down. Our job is to connect [with communities], reconnect, set out our stall”.
On the party’s new housing policy, she said: “People said to us very clearly, we want concrete [policies]. And we heard that loud and clear”.
The party has pledged to spend €39 billion on housing over the next five years to deliver 300,000 homes, if the party is elected to government.
“We have launched last week a hugely comprehensive, five-year, fully-costed, fully-deliverable plan. This is the first time any political party has done this outside of government,” she said.
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