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policy dimension in Fianna Fáil’s version of republicanism:

      What happened was this. I arrived in: they were lovely people, Nora in particular. Everything was going along, happy days. I went to one meeting, I went to another meeting. There was a discussion, and I raised the idea of – I don’t think I even used the word ‘equality’, I think I used the word ‘equity’– and there was a kind of a puzzled intake of breath in the room.32

      She addressed the party’s ardfheis, which was held at the Royal Dublin Society premises in November 1998. The issue was policing in Northern Ireland, and the Irish Times reported:

      Ms Mary Lou McDonald, Dublin West, speaking on the reform of the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary, predecessor of the current Police Service of Northern Ireland], said the RUC was composed exclusively of people from one tradition and they were utterly incapable of carrying out fair policing. There had been victims who had died at the hands of the RUC. There needed to be root-and-branch change to the policing system.33

      McDonald had the feeling that her interest in the North, especially the Orange Order dispute with nationalist residents in Portadown over its demand to march along the Garvaghy Road, was not widely shared in the party. This contributed to her decision to leave Fianna Fáil after about a year:

      I had been active then on the parading issue in Garvaghy Road and all of that, and there was kind of a very mixed response to that within the party, and a level of disengagement. So it all amounted to me saying, you know, this is just the wrong place for me. It wasn’t to cast an aspersion on anybody else: it was the wrong place for me to be. That was the sense, so I was sort of a misfit in that whole scenario.34

      Along with suggestions that her progress was obstructed in Fianna Fáil, there is an apparently contradictory claim that she turned down a nomination to run for a ‘safe’ council seat in the June 1999 local elections. She flatly denies this also: ‘Listen, I was neither shafted nor was I offered a seat. It didn’t arise.’ Asked how her move to Sinn Féin came about in the end, she says:

      I suppose, first of all I knew some of the lads through the Irish National Congress, although that wasn’t the crucial thing... I remember going to a meeting in the Mansion House. Gerry [Adams] spoke at it, I can’t remember if Martin [McGuinness] spoke at it, I don’t think he did. But certainly Gerry spoke at it, and I just said to myself: ‘These people actually have their act together. And they know what they are doing’... Maybe it was a bit of a leap of faith on my part because I would have known certain individuals within Sinn Féin, but I wouldn’t have grown up in a place where Sinn Féin was organised and kind of a known quantity and all of that stuff... But it was just the politics of it sort of appealed to me: that blend of support for the peace process, Irish unity, all of that matters a great deal to me. But then, joined, inextricably bound up with that: social justice and social equality... For my politics, I wanted both of those things, I didn’t want a little bit of one or a little bit of the other, I wanted both of those things, so that’s where the Sinn Féin appeal was for me, and it was the right decision... The party was smaller at that stage, it was a more closed circle in a sense. So you arrived along as a kind of a new person in it; right enough, people take the measure of you and suss you out, which is all fair enough, but notwithstanding all of that I think I knew pretty quickly that I was in the right spot.

      She believes the party is more open to new recruits nowadays: ‘I think for people joining now, perhaps particularly women, they come into a very different atmosphere and a very different environment.’ (There was a time when joining Sinn Féin might have led to some Garda surveillance because the IRA campaign was in full swing but McDonald says she did not experience any of that.)35

      She told Alex Kane in 2013: ‘When I got politically involved, when I became active, I was looking for somewhere you could actually make a difference, and Sinn Féin provide that space. There’s a kind of stereotypical thing about what a ‘Shinner’ should look like and that doesn’t tally with the reality.’ Kane commented: ‘She was a perfect catch for Sinn Féin, exactly the sort of person they needed: the sort of person who would normally have pursued a career in Fianna Fáil. She was young, bright, articulate and attractive.’3636 A general election was called in the Republic in 2002, and McDonald was chosen as the Sinn Féin candidate in Dublin West. This was her first time to run for public office and she secured 2,404 votes, equivalent to 8.02 per cent of first preferences. Coming seventh in a field of nine, she was eliminated on the third count. Brian Lenihan Jr topped the poll for Fianna Fáil, with Trotskyist candidate Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party (who got almost half of Mary Lou’s transfers under the Irish system of proportional representation), and Labour’s Joan Burton, taking the other two seats.37

      Her internal rise in Sinn Féin has been a rapid one. In 2001, she became a member of the ardchomhairle (executive council); four years later she succeeded Mitchel McLaughlin – currently the speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly – as chair of the party. And in 2009 she took over from Pat Doherty – currently abstentionist MP for West Tyrone – as vice-president. McDonald attracted controversy when she took part in a commemoration ceremony at the statue of former IRA leader Seán Russell in Dublin’s Fairview Park on 17 August 2003. A photograph in the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht for 21 August 2003 shows McDonald, at this stage a declared candidate in the following June’s elections to the European Parliament, smiling benignly at Belfast republican Brian Keenan, who gave the main oration.

      Born in Fairview, Russell took part in the 1916 Rising and sided with the anti-Treaty IRA through the Civil War and beyond. In 1926, he was part of a mission to buy arms in the Soviet Union. In 1938 he was appointed chief of staff of the IRA. Regarding itself as the true government of Ireland, the organisation declared war on Britain in January 1939 and began a campaign of bomb attacks on British targets, especially electricity supply-points. An apolitical militarist, Russell did not care who provided arms to the republican movement and took very literally republican father-figureWolfe Tone’s dictum that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. He travelled to the US to drum up support, got arrested, skipped bail, secured passage on a steamer heading for Italy and, in May 1940, ended up in Berlin. After three months’ training in explosives, he headed back to Ireland on a German U-boat in the company of Spanish Civil War veteran Frank Ryan, who had just been released from one of Franco’s prisons into German hands. However, Russell became ill and died at sea on 14 August 1940, with the result that the mission was aborted. Reporting on Keenan’s speech in Fairview, An Phoblacht said:

      Brian reviewed the strange history of Seán Russell from his birth in Fairview in 1893 to his death at the end [sic] of the Second World War. He talked about the part Russell had played during the ‘20s and the ‘30s in the ideological disputes surrounding the RepublicanCongress and the formation of Saor Éire, and his role, as IRA Chief of Staff, in the disastrous campaign in England during the Second World War […] ‘I don’t know,’ Brian acknowledged, ‘what was in the depth of Seán Russell’s thinking down the years, but I am sure he was never far from Pearse’s own position, who said, ‘as a patriot, preferring death to slavery, I know no other way’.38

      Keenan, who died of cancer five years later, was himself the mastermind of an IRA bombing campaign that unsettled London in the mid-1970s. He was jailed for eighteen years in 1980 for his involvement in the deaths of eight people, including author and broadcaster Ross McWhirter, who had offered a £50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of IRA bombers, and oncologist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, one of several people killed by car bombs.39 Earlier, Keenan had travelled extensively to establish contacts in East Germany, Lebanon and Syria, and negotiate arms deals for the IRA, most notably with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi in 1972. But following his release on parole in 1993, Keenan used his influence to persuade the IRA leadership to embrace the peace process. At his funeral, members of the Balcombe Street Siege group - the IRA unit that Keenan organised in England in the mid-1970s - carried his coffin.

      Two weeks after the Fairview ceremony, columnist Kevin Myers castigated McDonald in the Irish Times for her participation in a ceremony to honour a ‘filthy wretch’, whose collaboration with the Nazis took place after Hitler had publicly pledged to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Noting that McDonald was a candidate in the European elections, Myers wondered what she would say to her

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