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Showing posts with label Mary Lou McDonald. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mary Lou McDonald. Show all posts
Irish Times ✏ After nearly 20 years playing the ultimate long-game, can the party leader transform it from one-time political pariahs into a party of government?

Jennifer Bray

Implacable and stubborn, ruthlessly pragmatic, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who is now five years in the party’s top post, is also described by those who know her as possessing extraordinary stamina and self-belief.

Those who look at her with a more critical eye, however, judge her to be a wily opportunist desperate not to fall foul of the public, someone who talks a big game about change but has yet to prove she can bring it about.

Depending on who you ask, she was either plucked from obscurity and primed for leadership over 20 years, or a canny grafter who has made countless personal sacrifices to stamp her way to the top of the traditionally male-dominated arena of Irish politics.

One person who has watched her at close quarters says she rules Sinn Féin with as much iron discipline as Gerry Adams did before her, always keen to emphasise to anyone who needs reminding, North or South, that she is the boss.

Continue reading @ Irish Times.

Mary Lou McDonald Faces Her Biggest Challenge Yet, Five Years After Rising To The Top Of Sinn Féin

Anthony McIntyre  ☠ It was probably the easiest interview she ever underwent, but few could deny that even with Ryan Tubridy's super soft ball wrapped in cotton wool, the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald acquitted herself with considerable aplomb. 

There was no late tackle from the Late Late front man. I even found myself laughing when she quipped that relaxation time for her is when she gets home to her "mansion." It was the moment the interview, not difficult to begin with, swung decisively in her favour. The victory lap came when she suggested that for the first time since the formation of this state the citizens it governs have a chance to elect an administration which does not include Fianna Fail or Fine Gael. Even though the offer is to get rid of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and hand the reins to Tweedleduh, the audience was with her and its applause must have sent a shudder through the other two establishment parties.

Other because Sinn Fein has worked assiduously to become the established order's loyal opposition.  McDonald's statement that the likelihood of her party in government with Fine Gael is a long shot is probably only because Fine Gael is more of an ideological party than Sinn Fein and might not be as eager to abandon everything it purported to believe in just to get jacksies on ministerial seats. Hard to see it calling for an end to the Special Criminal Court equating with Sinn Fein's flip in the opposite direction. But watch how the long shot over the next two years starts to shorten. 

On the Late Late, McDonald waxed glowingly of the sterling job both the no jury court and the Garda were doing in the fight against gangland. An affirmative nod that Sinn Fein has not the slightest intention of being a party of the Left, but a party of the establishment. A party for whom the battle cry has been change has seen itself change beyond recognition from the days when its leader was a member of the IRA Army Council, so that it can slot into the establishment with the minimum of fuss. As Vincent Browne intuited almost seven years ago:

It is not that Sinn Féin is a threat to the established order, it is that Sinn Féin wants to become part of the established order.

It is not just that McDonald and the previous president have been reported to be millionaires, and millionaires are no more in favour of equality or change than bishops favour same sex marriage. It is much more structural than the appetites of millionaires. Sinn Fein has been interpellated -- in the Althusserian meaning of the term -- by the dominant memes of capitalist society in preparation for becoming part of the ruling bloc. It is a system guarding imperative. It will not in the slightest alter how the ruling bloc rules. 

In this scenario there is not a chance that Sinn Fein will build 100,000 homes in five years. McDonald's slogan -- it is not a strategy -- of "just build" is not merely populist. It is as vacuous as praying for the houses to magically appear. The previous leader would have given out 100, 000 wheelie bins and then claimed to have provided enough shelter with roofs over the heads of an equivalent number of people, snarling at anybody suggesting his claim was literally rubbish. McDonald does not have the latitude for error afforded to her predecessor who few considered Taoiseach material. She is a serious contender and the stakes are high. Little room for nonsense or dancing naked with dogs on a trampoline in her 'mansion."

Steady as she hopes to go, the choppiness might only have been avoided on the Late Late because the elephant in the room was not allowed to trumpet its presence to the extent that would have allowed for a less anodyne exchange. She will not be out of the woods until the current Hutch trial has concluded and is no longer sub judice. An Irish Independent poll claims to reveal that an uncomfortably large number of people believe there are links between Sinn Fein aligned Northerners and Dublin gangland. 

The allegations levelled by Jonathan Dowdall - a state witness in the Hutch trial - in illegally obtained tape recordings will be viewed in many circles as all the more credible because he didn't realise he was being taped and might therefore have had no reason to be guarded.  At the same time, there is no compelling reason to feel he was not boasting to Hutch as they journeyed to and from the North allegedly to meet senior figures in the Provisional IRA.

Mary Lou McDonald certainly does not have the presentational issues as Sean O'Rourke so pointedly observed of Gerry Adams. He only had to deny something for it to become officially believed. She might help her own cause in fending off disquieting suggestions about supposed Sinn Fein links to gangsterism if, when asked does she still believe Adams when he claims never to have been a member of the IRA, she flatly replies in the negative. If she says she continues to believe him, chances are nobody is going to believe her.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

No Late Tackle

Matt Treacy ✒There are several ways to interpret the apparent decision by Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s husband, Martin Lanigan, to issue legal threats regarding a recently published book by Shane Ross.


In the book, Ross devotes an entire chapter to how they managed to acquire a site for their house on the Navan Road and to subsequently build a rather impressive home there. The story about the “luxurious 11 room detached villa” was not even original as Sam Smyth had broached the subject for a piece published by the Irish Mail on Sunday in 2015.

I do recall it because it was at a time when I myself was working for Sinn Féin in Leinster House and was one of those who, including Mary Lou, were apparently expected to hand over everything we earned above the national industrial wage.

I and a small number of people had refused for years to do so and I think the practise ended as a consequence of that and the fact that at least one TD was revealed not to have been complying with the requirement. And properly so, because anyone who believes that a TD can survive on whatever the average industrial wage is, clearly has no idea of what a demanding job it is. Perhaps that is not a popular thing to say, but it happens to be true.

Nor ought anyone who is paid by the taxpayer – as I and every other person working for Sinn Féin in Leinster House and Stormont were – be expected to hand over, under threat of dismissal, any part of their wages to a third entity. Apart from that, all such crude pseudo egalitarian schemes only lead to abuse and hypocrisy.

The former socialist states were notorious for the existence of a wealthy nomenklatura that was able to afford multiple homes and extravagant lifestyles while putatively existing on the same wage as the drivers of their Zil limousines. Irish republicans who visited Cuba as regime guests were astounded by the Roman Emperoreaque opulence enjoyed by the Castro gang in the midst of grinding poverty.

The same applied in Sinn Féin where not only were certain people given dispensation not to pay the vig, but where a wealthy elite attached to the movement had managed to acquire substantial properties and who in some cases were not particularly observant of labour legislation regarding wages and trade union representation.

That’s neither here nor there other than as it touches upon Mary Lou’s situation. Personally, I could not care less what type of house she lives in. As far as I can see, herself and Martin Lanigan would have had the means to get a mortgage and to build a house for themselves. Good luck to them.

There is, however, another way to look at this. Sinn Féin – while not actually socialist in economic terms as they do not believe in state ownership of even utilities such as gas and electricity – do feed upon a populist resentment of people who appear to be getting on better than others, in material terms at least.

So when you are effectively on the same side of the fence as seriously wealthy people like the Woke billionaires who fund the liberal left, and when you do not even support raising corporation taxes on them; implying that someone who rents out a second home, or might have a mostly vacant holiday home (a touchy subject that among the Shinners) or who is engaged in small business is somehow responsible for the fact that you do not have the same stuff, then you are peddling petty resentment, not societal change.

Just the same as those who focus on Mary Lou’s family home are focusing on trivialities rather than what politics ought to be about. Not least perhaps for the reason that any lingering animus against the Shinners amongst the Dublin liberal bourgeoisie is social and cultural – just as it was for a long time against Fianna Fáil – rather than to do with the substance of how Ireland ought to be run. Upon which they mostly all agree, as the seminal political events of the past decade and more here have proven.

If the best line of attack they have against Mary Lou is that she has a nice gaff, they may leave the keys to Government buildings in Parnell Square . . . 

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

About “Mary Lou’s Posh Gaff”

Bill O'Brien ✒ on the similarities between the Sinn Fein of Mary Lou McDonald and Fianna Fail.

Most people in Ireland follow the political philosophies from their own immediate families. It's time to look at the new leader of Sinn Féin and to her particular political antecedents. The new leader of Sinn Féin's political baptism comes from the mildly republican wing of the the Fianna Fail party. On entering University College Dublin she became a member of that party, eventually moved to a civil rights group supporting the Civil Rights Association in the occupied zone, as that had been the hot political issue of the day.

So let's go back to the beginning of the Fianna Fail party in the lofty suburbs of Rathgar and Rathmines area of Dublin where she lived out her childhood and adolescence. She went to a private school in the area, this was her humble beginnings. The house she was brought up in at today's prices could reach over million of euros.

So what was the republicanism of Rathmines and Rathgar?

In 1926 Fianna Fail left Sinn Féin the majority of the more politically aware and socially conscious members of the party joined Fianna Fail. Constance Markievicz encouraged the women of Cumann na mBan to join the new party at the at the time. Most of the progressive women did join. Constance 
Markievicz herself, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kathleen Lynn were among those moved from Sinn Féin to Fianna Fail. Countess Margaret was a Fianna Fail TD at the time of the death. The Irish Republican Army was still in existence in both Cities and towns, as well as rural areas and were independent from Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein only became the political wing in the 1950s. A lot of the members of the new party were members of the IRA. The IRA were responsible for the fundraising to pay for the new party, mostly holding up illegal bookies offices. There is still a Fianna Fail cumann on the north side of Dublin called after a man who was shot dead by the Special Branch during one of the IRA robberies.

The last time the IRA were active on behalf of Fianna Fail was when General O Duffy planed to match on Dublin with his Blueshirt army. O Duffy felt he had the support of the Free State Army and the Garda,  an organisation he was the founder of. Fianna Fail used the IRA to face them down, confining both the Free State Army and Garda to barracks. O Duffy didn't turn up for the fight and Fianna Fail won the day. It was probably Sean Lemass and Todd Andrews, with their superior political understandings within the Fianna Fail party at the time, who knew what to do.

Fianna Fail knew how to appeal to the ordinary people and subsequently became known as the party of the small farmers and urban working class. They stole that from the Labour Party, and housing was their main issue. Fianna Fail created many semi-state industries and expanded those that already existed, employing a lot of their supporters as they developed and expanded. This eventually was to lead to a culture of cronyism: for if you were never in Fianna Fail you would never get a job. They justified this because of the brutal way the Free Staters treated their Fianna Fail supporters after the establishment of the state. The first programme for government published by Fianna Fail is an extremely progressive document, something that any Socialist party would be proud of.

Fianna Fail then went to destroy the IRA, initially releasing all Republican prisoners from Mountjoy jail and then taking stock, studying the factions within the Republican movement and picking them off one by one. On social issues and on the National question they became more moderate. They created a new force within the Gardai of former Republicans who knew the workings of the Republican Movement, where they were strong or weak, and were able to deal with militant republicanism effectively for the state, which Fianna Fail had now most definitely bought into.

Fianna Fail went on to open concentration camps and execute Republicans in the coming years, while still claiming the mantle of republicanism for themselves.

The current leader of Sinn Fein's family, was very much a part of and agreed with all of this, and that is very much a part of her political background and current thinking.

**Looking at the present and future

In the two years since she has ascended to the position of president of Sinn Fein she has clearly consolidated her position. It is no longer respectable to say you had a part in the armed struggle. People who were in the armed struggle have now been deleted from the organisation, sidelined, some given consolation jobs, others - like a man who served time in England -  has been told his form of republicanism was for dinosaurs. Dinosaurs must be made extinct. Even a former MEP - who for a short time ended up as an MLA - and who was part of a bombing campaign in England, serving time after being arrested with the Brighton bomber, has now been sidelined, given an obscure position as a consolation. Commemorations for dead Republicans have been severely curtailed, and from now on will be given less importance.

The first move by the new president towards a Fianna Fail mentality and policy is the recognition of the Special Criminal Court by Sinn Fein. She is looking for coalition partners as she feels she is taking the party into government after the next election. What would really suit her is if Fianna Fail was to split: she would then be able to go back to the social, political and economic policies of a respectable Fianna Fail. She knows that the electorate that Fianna Fail had for years is up for grabs and she intends to capitalise on that. 

Republicans and socialist Republicans are going to be in for a bad time. There is a rootlessness within Sinn Fein at the minute which the previous generation of Fianna Failers could identify with and find acceptable. The apples don't fall far from the tree.

⏭ Bill O'Brien is an independent republican.

Do Apples Fall Far From The Tree?

Anthony McIntyre ✒ thinks Mary Lou McDonald squandered an opportunity to clarify the status of children as non-combatants in a war. 

“I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means which cannot be excused "➖ Albert Camus

I first learned of the killing of Lord Mountbatten on a prison visit from my late mother and brother. It was during the blanket protest, so other ways of accessing the news were not as available to us. At that point, on “our wing” in H4, there was no crystal miniature radio “bangled” away in a back passage, the usual dank depository for prison contraband: which was just about everything given that just about everything was prohibited by prison management as part of its strategy of deprivation, physical and mental.

On the visit with my family, I was told that Mountbatten had died in an explosion on a boat but there was some talk that it might have been gas related. Such was the uncertainty as to why anyone might wish to end his life.

Clarity had no more of a presence in the jail wings either. When I eventually returned to my cell and relayed the news to my fellow blanket men, they too seemed unsure as to the provenance of his fate. Later that same summer evening word was shouted across from our protesting comrades in H5 about the British Army sustaining serious casualties in a bomb attack. There was no doubt as to who was responsible. The mood that night was one of jubilation. The same sentiment was nowhere near as palpable in response to Mountbatten. Unlike the Paras at Narrowwater, about whom there was no equivocation, his status as a “legitimate target” seemed less certain.

Once it was confirmed that the IRA had carried out both operations, and in particular seemed to have hurt British officialdom more through Mountbatten than the soldiers, the general attitude on the prison protest wings was that the Mullaghmore operation was a job well done. Mountbatten was a second cousin of the Queen and India’s last viceroy – something few of us on the blanket mentioned at the time. Those of us who knew anything about him had acquired that knowledge courtesy of the World At War television series. That an IRA bomb rather than a gas explosion had claimed him coupled with the annoyance of the British establishment and press, was enough to move the needle for us. What the world might think seemed irrelevant. It was either with us or against us. When I smuggled newspaper clippings back to the Blocks from a Belfast court, collated and perfectly packaged in clingfilm by Martin Hurson - a former blanketman but then back on remand and who would later die on hunger strike - which cited Yasser Arafat condemning the killing, the Palestinian was dismissed as a waster who didn’t know what he was talking about.

A young nephew of a prisoner later told him a joke on a visit. The nephew stated that what really had killed Mountbatten was dandruff: he had left his head and shoulders on the shore. When the prisoner in turn relayed the joke to us, we laughed and guffawed. The man whom we previously held few views on one way or the other had been transformed into an arch nemesis worthy of being ripped apart.

In that atmosphere of triumphalism, where I was as raucous as the rest, the fate of the children or anyone else on board was a footnote. They had become casualties of war, the horror of their deaths not permitted by us to blemish the act of giving the Brits their comeuppance. Given our circumstances of life in a cauldron of deprivation underpinned by prison staff violence, it is understandable that - even with the benefit of reflection - the well of sympathy was there for ourselves alone to drink from. We were young and empathy was in short supply.

The Mullaghmore attack featured again during the week when Sinn Fein was put to the test of public scrutiny over its attitude to the IRA’s perspective on British royalty. The party had been so gushing with its condolences to the monarchy on the death of Philip Mountbatten, that a blind man could sense what the next question was going to be.

Mary Lou McDonald stepped up to the plate. Before she had the time to drop it the media, ears blocked and eyes wide shut, made a story out of nothing. It claimed she had apologised for the killing. Yes, her predecessor as party president had been on the army council of the IRA at the time of the killing, but it was hardly something she could be remotely linked to. Gerry Adams stating that “he knew the danger involved in coming to this country” was a sentiment she was going to steer well clear of. Any claim she might make to have had no hand or part in IRA operations would be readily believable.

So, without having looked at it, to my mind there seemed no way she would have Sinn Fein apologising for an IRA operation given the fiction the party had sustained for decades that it was not in any way linked to the IRA.

The most she said was that she was sorry that Mountbatten or any other person had died during the war. That comes nowhere close to being a political apology. Her undoing came when Fran McNulty later interviewed her on Prime Time, where he focused less on Mountbatten and more on the dead children, Paul Maxwell and Nicholas Knatchbull. His question was simple but direct – in the clear knowledge that children had embarked on a boat was it wrong to press the button and detonate the bomb? That was the moment the plate dropped. McDonald pressed a self-destruct button of her own and refused to acknowledge that there were no circumstances in which such an act could ever be right. She bobbed and she weaved, but he landed the punch.

Whatever the justification or mitigation in targeting Mountbatten, he should never have been attacked while in the company of civilians or children. Unlike the targeting of the Paras later the same day, that is what makes the attack on the Shadow V a war crime. McDonald, usually an accomplished media performer, was poor to the point that one observer commented “This is as bad an interview as Mary Lou has done in a long time … really struggling with basic answers to pretty simplistic questions.”

Mary Lou McDonald should not be apologising for the attack on behalf of Sinn Fein, unless she is willing to admit that it was the work of the Republican Movement of which Sinn Fein and the IRA were the primary constituent parts. Slim chance of that.

She should not politically apologise for the IRA’s war against British state terrorism. To do so would be to cloud the issue of what helped cause and sustain that war. Sorry alone – swing alone.

She should not be evasive about the targeting of children. The option is there for her to call on the IRA to apologise for a war crime.

In these matters where time, maturity, empathy, nuance all combine to induce more ethical reflection, I find something useful in the thinking of the just war theorist, Michael Walzer when observing a play by Albert Camus:

In the early twentieth century, a group of Russian revolutionaries decided to kill a Tsarist official, the Grand Duke Sergei, a man personally involved in the repression of radical activity. They planned to blow him up in his carriage, and on the appointed day one of their number was in place along the Grand Duke’s usual route. As the carriage drew near, the young revolutionary, a bomb hidden under his coat, noticed that his victim was not alone; on his lap he held two small children. The would-be assassin looked, hesitated, then walked quickly away. He would wait for another occasion. Camus has one of his comrades say, accepting this decision: “Even in destruction, there’s a right way and a wrong way—and there are limits.”

Mullaghmore was the wrong way and children are off limits. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Children Are Not Combatants

Irish Times ✒ Party leader calls on unionists to become involved in discussions on a united Ireland

Pat Leahy

Mary Lou McDonald: “I would say to our unionist friends ‘be part of this conversation’.”

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has said there will be a united Ireland within 10 years, and sought to reassure unionists that they would “remain British” if Northern Ireland voted to leave the United Kingdom.

In a YouTube interview with the British journalist and left-wing campaigner Owen Jones, Ms McDonald said: “We’ll do it in the next decade. We’ll do it in this decade, actually. This is the decade of opportunity.”

She predicted: “We can have our referendum, we can win it, and win it well.”

“We have citizens that are British...they are British in a partitioned Ireland and they will be British in a united Ireland.”

She called on unionists to become involved in discussions on a united Ireland, saying that “we have a huge amount of preparatory work to do for an orderly constitutional transition”.

She urged unionists "not to equate the reunification project with threat or loss...it has to be about gain or additionality."

Continue reading @ Irish Times.

Sinn Féin’s McDonald Says There Will Be United Ireland Within 10 Years

Belfast Telegraph ➨ Sinn Fein leader says any 'new Ireland' must respect and facilitate the beliefs of everyone.

By Mark Bain 

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has laid out her plans for a united Ireland, but warned that people must start preparing a Plan B and Plan C, as their first option of what that might look like may not be available.

Ms McDonald also had her say on the role women play in government, and hit out at those who continue to link her party to the IRA.

Speaking to the Basically with Stefanie Preissner podcast, Ms McDonald said the issue of convincing unionists that embracing a new Ireland was the way forward was "a tricky one".

"Once upon a time everybody agreed that Ireland should be free," she said.

"We have never strayed from that belief, but I hope we're all going to get back on that page again, even though there has been a lot of hurt and injury and sadness. We now have a viable, robust democratic process and I hope that now will be our moment where we fix the thing that was broken and end partition.

"I think that we can have not just an united Ireland, but an equal Ireland, an entire society of people getting the chance to turn the page.

Continue reading @ Belfast Telegraph. 

Selling Irish Unity To Unionists Will Be 'Tricky', Says Sinn Fein Chief McDonald

From the Irish Times a charge by Mary Lou McDonald that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are striving to lock Sinn Fein out of power while co-opting its policies.

In February we had a general election that produced the most seismic result in the history of the State; shattering the traditional duopoly of the so-called “big two” parties and reshaping the Irish political landscape.

For the first time ever, neither Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael won the largest share of the popular vote, and for the first time ever the combined forces of political conservatism failed to win a majority of Dáil seats.

Parties that advocated a different vision of how the State might work – in terms of how we provide adequate, affordable housing for our citizens, how our health system functions, how we provide for people’s retirement and how we redistribute wealth – made big gains on the basis of a mandate for real change.

That is what people voted for, and notwithstanding the current crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, the people have cast their verdict and before long the election result must count for something.

The continuation in office of a caretaker government for an indefinite period is neither desirable, practical or constitutionally tenable. More than ever, given the crisis we are in, the country needs a stable government to see us through what is to come and to deliver what people voted for.

Continue reading the Irish Times. 

This Crisis Shows That Sinn Féin Was Right

Via The Transcripts: From 1 November 2014: Máiría Cahill went public with her allegations of IRA child sexual abuse and cover-up. This video and caption appeared in the Irish Independent on this date and can be seen here.

Playing Politics

With a new spotlight being shown on the bullying and intimidation practiced by Sinn Fein, we remind our readers that this behaviour is nothing new.

It is always right to expose bullies and thugs.

Sinn Fein, like other bullies and abusers, survives with the complicity of silence, whether it is politically motivated - to "protect the peace process" - or via intimidation.

Abusers survive by isolating the abused. The silence surrounding the experience enables and perpetuates the isolation. "Gas-lighting" is a contemporary term applied to the tactic: the victim is made to be the one with the problem, crazy, exaggerating, nothing to see here...an isolated case of a bitter misfit. Whisper campaigns are a form of abuse and gas-lighting. Those on the outside believe the whispers and contribute to the isolation of the victim.

When individual people now come forward with their experience, we must support them, and help amplify their experience through validation in sharing our own similar experience. They are not alone. It happened to others. It happened to us. It will keep happening. Victims are doing the right thing in speaking out.

We must also keep in mind the larger picture; this is not just an abuse of individuals in the party, or in the movement, in the community, or of those who disagree with the party. This is an abuse of society.

Originally published in 2014, we believe this article by Carrie Twomey is worth revisiting, in light of the ongoing exposure of Sinn Fein bullying within the party .

Republicanism, especially as it hoovers up young people who are only beginning in politics, suffers from goldfish syndrome in its short-term memory of what came before. The lies of the leaders are accepted blindly and forgotten. What was done to others can come as a shock to those who perhaps previously participated in unthinkingly repeating slander unquestioningly.

This is the value of gas-lighting and isolation for the abuser: it is only when that abuse comes to your own door that you really see it for what it is. Until then, it's just the party line. And what is the harm in that?

The Bare Face of Fascism 


This Sunday’s papers made for difficult reading. Much of the news coverage of Máiría Cahill’s case has been both invigorating and hard to bear. It is wonderful to see such plain spoken audacity finally get both heard and due recognition. The requirements of the processing of peace meant that challenging voices have been too long silenced and vilified. Censorship, self or otherwise, and a deliberate averting of the public eye was the rule rather than the exception. This allowed the fascistic monster in our midst to morph and take on a new form rather than disappear. All for the sake of peace, a peace without justice or principle, and increasingly, without meaning.

Other aspects of the Cahill commentary and information relayed is personally challenging, as what is discussed is so similar to my own experience. I understand fully and painfully what it means when Máiría, speaking of the way she has been treated by Sinn Fein, says it has re-traumatised her: it shocks me, because it is forcing me to confront the plain fact of my own trauma.

You get through crisis because you have to. It is what it is. You don’t wallow or think of yourself as a victim; you take responsibility for your life and you do what needs done. So to think of the last few years of my life as traumatic is not easy for me. But reading about Mairia’s fear, tears, and anger, and knowing how intense everything she is going through right now is shakes me and forces me to name my trauma for what it was. Saying that the last few years of my life has been a nightmare is easy – it is a way to both acknowledge and dismiss how much it hurt. To accept that I have been traumatized is something altogether different. To see a mirror of my experience so readily accepted in the media as traumatic, and horrible, and cruel is shocking. Because it means what I have had to deal with is also cruel, and horrible, and traumatic.

At one point it got so bad I went to my GP begging for help. I stopped sleeping out of fear, was up all night every night. A monster had taken over my life. I suffered from severe depression and exhibited all the hallmarks of PTSD except that the TS was never fully P, and still isn’t to this day. I was prescribed Prozac which helped tremendously and availed of counselling which was even more helpful and for which I am extremely grateful.

Because my experience is political it is hard to explain or express emotionally. Traditionally, we are supposed to be unemotional, or at least, hold emotion back from politics; the rules of the game are that it gets dirty and low, and the only way to win on that is to never let them see you cry. You have to take it on the chin and move on.

My experience, however, while rooted in politics is not unemotional nor without consequences. For speaking out against Sinn Fein, I have been traumatized. Vilified, intimidated, and threatened, I have lived in fear and under surveillance. I do not have a private life; my life with my husband is an open book as we have no sense of privacy and know that anything can be used against us at any time.

It first began in earnest in the wake of the IRA’s murder of Joe O’Connor, where I was subjected to a picket of my home, new in a foreign country with no family and few friends, six months pregnant. I had been a union organizer and was no stranger to pickets, although picketing a home in the dark of night was unusual. I faced the mob with my back straight. I named my daughter Truth in honour of our defence of it.

And that is what I, and my husband, had done. We had spoken the truth. And we continued to speak the truth, no matter how difficult or how scary it was. And we highlighted the truths the processors of peace wanted buried: that fear and intimidation was being used to impose an imperfect peace that would never last because its foundation was as false and hollow as the lies being used to uphold it were.

For 8 years we published The Blanket, and were hated, attacked, and smeared for doing so. On the Slugger O'Toole website, I helped expose the terrible lie at heart of the 1981 Hunger Strike because I refused to be silent, and refused to stop asking questions.

Alongside this, the oral history of the Belfast Project was being collected by my husband. Others, too, refused to be silent, and understood the importance of leaving a record of their truth. Given what we faced for what we published in The Blanket, we knew the danger his taking this project on entailed. We thought the institution sponsoring the project appreciated the risk too, but found out to great cost that they only cared about their own financial risk.

When we moved south we thought we were closing a chapter in our lives. We wound down The Blanket and attempted to adjust to a new life. The attack on our neighbour’s home upon the publication of Voices From the Grave reminded us that our new life was still our life. My husband was under threat; Bobby Storey thundered about the IRA code in speeches and the Andersonstown News put it on the front page to reinforce the message.

The arrival of the first subpoena of the Belfast Project truly upended our lives. The sustained intimidation and character assassination that was conducted by Sinn Fein was unrelenting. And it was cruel. They came at us from every angle, including my husband’s own union, seeking every opportunity to undermine and discredit him, all in order to protect their leader, Gerry Adams. They want to break you, to place you under so much pressure and strain that you crack.

Unfortunately for Sinn Fein we had been living, as my husband often described it, at the bottom of the ocean for so long because of the sustained hate campaign Sinn Fein waged against us, we had become so well acclimatised to intense pressure that it was normal.

But what I am faced with today is that what we went through and what we have faced is not normal, and should never be normal. What Máiría Cahill, and the McCartney Sisters, and the Quinns, and the Raffertys, the Donnellys, the Perrys, the Notorantonios and O’Connors, the Kearneys, the Bennetts, and far too many more, have gone through and are going through is not normal.

It is not normal to be afraid to answer the phone or open your door. But I am. Every time a little surge of fear, a small question, is present. I answer it anyway, but the fear never leaves.

Like Máiría Cahill, I have reported online threats to the Gardai. Like Máiría Cahill, I have no faith or trust in the judicial system in the north. Months after I had reported the online death threat made against me to the Gardai, my husband’s judicial review of the subpoenas took place in the north. It was a disappointing and expensive farce. It was supposed to review the impact of the subpoenas on our safety. It was an exercise in the PSNI self-justifying itself. They had no knowledge of any of our contact with the Gardai. Why would they risk their subpoena case in acknowledging the reality of the threat we faced? Of course they were always going to say they had no knowledge of anything. To admit we were at risk because of their actions would mean an end to their fishing expedition. Our lives didn’t matter and mean little to the machinations of the state.

Like Máiría Cahill, I know the fear of going to Belfast in the wake of a Sinn Fein rally. The weekend of Adams’ arrest, when ‘Boston College Informer Republican McIntyre’ went up on the walls and Bobby Storey thundered about not having gone away to remind everyone else to keep their mouths shut, when the cultish mural of abject adoration went up and the online chorus sung that people should ‘direct their anger at the touts’, I was due to be in Belfast for the annual Brendan Hughes Memorial Lecture. I am on the Family and Friends of Brendan Hughes Committee, along with Ivor Bell, Paddy Joe Rice, Danny McBearty, and Gerard Hodgins; Gerry Conlon was also on our committee before he died and was instrumental in organizing this year’s event. Clare Daly and Gareth Peirce were due to speak in West Belfast. I had a responsibility to be there. Bell, who had been charged before Adams’ arrest, was going – I could hardly not show up. But I was terrified. I was more frightened than I had ever been in my life. I swallowed my fear and I got on the train, but I will never forget how scared I was, and when I saw the graffiti on the walls I knew I was right to be afraid.


I have not even scratched the surface of what I have gone through – these few examples are just the first that come to mind, but leave me feeling I have done an inadequate job of explaining what we, and those like Máiría who challenge the protected species that is Sinn Fein, face, and the emotional impact it has on us.

Like Máiría, I deeply understand the need to be believed, to be told, you are right, you are not crazy, you are not paranoid, you are not bitter, or a dissident, or out to get Gerry Adams or undermine the peace process, you are telling the truth, this did happen, and it was wrong. This is the beating heart of the desperate need of a truth process, for the ending of the conflict has meant too many victims have been denied even the basic dignity of acknowledgment and validation of their experience.

My family do not deserve to live through the fear of the threats we face for having dared to document history. No family does.

The bottom line is that the peace process has never been about peace. It has always been about protecting the British state at the expense of the people and it still is. Anything that challenges that or threatens to expose the real cost of what is being peddled is a threat to that state and treated as such. Nevermind if it is a victim of rape, or a child, or the family of someone brutually murdered, or a historian, or a journalist or just someone who has a sense of justice and outrage and dares to express it when wronged. The state's dirty secrets are worth more than all of us put together and they will do anything to protect them.

It is not the Mary Lou McDonalds who are the new face of Sinn Fein. Instead, it is the children who have come of age between peace and conflict. This is what Mairia Cahill symbolizes: those younger people who have grown up in the peace process, who have been gifted the promise of normality, who should remain untainted by the Troubles and have every right to demand to be so.

The Mary Lous of Sinn Fein want to continue with the corrupted legacy of power and control that the conflict gave to their leaders. The true future lay with those who say, “Enough” and speak out because it is the right thing to do. Stop traumatizing us. It is time for true and actual change, and those who face the future with courage and openness will be the ones who achieve it. The others will only deliver more of the same old lies and deceit, and with them the dirty war will continue on, business as usual.


See also: Killing Joe O'Connor


Sinn Fein Bullying: A Reminder Of The Face Of Fascism

Drawing on personal experience Independent Community Activist Cathal McCarthy opens a window into how Sinn Fein goes about its business.
 
For many of Sinn Féin’s opponents the issue of whether or not Gerry Adams used to be a member of the IRA seems to be their biggest problem with the party.

I’m Not Anti-Republican; I Just don’t Like the Way Sinn Féin Operates

Get ready for a bit more inconsistency and doublespeak occasioned by Mary Lou McDonald having called on Gerry Adams to share with the Garda any information he may have on former IRA members involved in the killing of a Dublin prison officer.

BC Touts

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