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Power Play. Deaglán de Bréadún
Читать онлайн.Название Power Play
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isbn 9781785370434
Автор произведения Deaglán de Bréadún
Издательство Ingram
There is no such thing as government and opposition in the European Parliament, so committee membership is vitally important. McDonald was appointed to the committee on Employment and Social Affairs, as well as becoming a substitute member of the committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. After the election campaign, the new MEP was back in the eye of the storm when she was among those who carried the coffin of Joe Cahill, one of the founders of the Provisional IRA, who died on 23 July 2004. A letter-writer in the Irish Times said: ‘Pictures of Mary-Lou McDonald carrying the coffin of that monster Joe Cahill shocked me to the bone.’ The letter concluded: ‘I want my vote back!’ The episode surfaced again in a Sunday Independent article by Emer O’Kelly on 24 October 2004, under the headline: ‘We should start to see Mary Lou as the enemy’. Italy’s Rocco Buttiglione had been nominated as the EU’s Justice Commissioner but his conservative Catholic views on homosexuality and the role of women in society aroused opposition among MEPs. O’Kelly wrote:
One of those questioning (and indeed damning him) was that well-known defender of civil liberties, Ms Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin MEP...She is a representative of the political wing of a subversive private army dedicated to the overthrow of the Irish State...When Joe Cahill, described as a ‘veteran republican’ died a few months ago, just weeks after Ms McDonald was elected to Europe, she helped carry his coffin to the grave. Cahill’s republicanism, veteran or otherwise, included a string of murders ar son na h-Éireann [Trans: on behalf of Ireland].
The Minister for Justice in the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government at the time, Michael McDowell, appeared on Today FM’s Sunday Supplement show with McDonald on 17 October 2004. When he said the IRA Army Council made all the key decisions for the republican movement and that senior figures in Sinn Féin were members of that body, McDonald challenged him to name them. McDowell replied: ‘If you really did want me to name them, you would then accuse me of trying to wreck the peace process.’ McDonald said: ‘I have no balaclava. Sinn Féin is a democratic party and we are part of the political mainstream. Sinn Féin is no safe haven for criminality.’50
Sinn Féin was caught up in a whole range of controversies throughout 2005. Possibly the most damaging, because of the horrific circumstances, was the murder of thirty-three-year-old father of two, Robert McCartney, from the mainly-nationalist Short Strand area, who was attacked outside a Belfast pub on the night of 30 January 2005. Republicans were blamed for the killing, and the dead man’s sisters launched an international campaign to achieve justice. The incident was condemned by Sinn Féin and there was a bizarre statement by the IRA that it was willing to shoot McCartney’s killers. Prior to the party’s ardfheis in March of that year, McDonald said: ‘Sinn Féin couldn’t have been more crystal clear in our condemnation of that murder and calls for people to come forward with information.’51
On 9 May 2005, McDonald and de Brún found themselves isolated at the European Parliament, when a motion condemned the McCartney murder and also criticised Sinn Féin for alleged failure to cooperate in the investigation. MEPs backed the resolution by 555-4, and there were 48 abstentions. Unionist MEPs joined with colleagues from an Irish nationalist background in supporting the proposal. McDonald and de Brún backed a separate motion that was less critical of the party and the IRA, but which supported the McCartney family’s efforts to bring those responsible to trial.52
The next Irish general election was very much on the party’s mind, and McDonald was being groomed for the Dublin Central constituency although another Sinn Féin candidate nearly took the seat on the previous occasion. In the previous general election in 2002, Councillor Nicky Kehoe, a former republican prisoner, only missed out by 57 votes. Normally, a candidate with such strong local support would be expected to run again, but it was clearly a Sinn Féin priority to get McDonald into the Dáil. Kehoe supporters were reported to be unhappy with the leadership decision.
An unsigned profile of McDonald published in Phoenix magazine on 12 August 2005 stated: ‘Cllr Nicky Kehoe had looked to be a shoo-in for Dublin Central following a near-miss in 2002 and a huge vote in the locals (3,609 first preference votes in Cabra-Glasnevin)... McDonald had at one stage been suggested as a candidate for Dublin West, her former base when she was a member of Fianna Fáil, but it now looks as if she will be proposed for Dublin Central.’
Sinn Féin opted to run her in that constituency and the party’s hopes were high that she would win a Dáil seat, as part of a significant increase in Sinn Féin representation at Leinster House. Niamh Connolly wrote in the Sunday Business Post: ‘There is serious tension with supporters of local election poll topper Nicky Kehoe, after McDonald was chosen to run in Dublin Central ahead of him.’53 Accompanying McDonald as she carried out an election canvass, journalist Tom Humphries observed: ‘There is a strange dissonance between the knee-jerk media response to Sinn Féin’s engagement in southern politics and the response Mary Lou gets on the doorsteps.’54 A further Phoenix profile, published on 18 May 2007, six days before the general election, said:
Can Mary Lou win a seat in the Taoiseach’s constituency?... Last October a poll commissioned by the Irish Mail on Sunday seriously unnerved Dublin Sinn Féin activists, showing her on just 6 per cent, behind the Green Party’s Patricia McKenna (7 per cent), Labour’s Joe Costello TD (11 per cent) and Fine Gael’s Cllr Paschal Donohoe (12 per cent). Other polls indicated that this was not a rogue poll and it appeared that while doughnutting with Adams at meetings in Downing Street, Stormont and elsewhere was good for the image, it was no substitute for hard graft in Ballybough and Summerhill... Since October it has been a six-and-a-half day week in Dublin Central for McDonald...
The general election took place on 24 May and, as the votes were being counted, it became clear that Sinn Féin candidates were doing quite poorly. There was a strong expectation, for example, that McDonald herself would succeed, but that was to underestimate the Taoiseach of the day and master of the electoral arts, Bertie Ahern, whose transfers in Dublin Central were critical in getting party colleague Cyprian Brady over the line, although the latter had only received 939 first preferences. McDonald got almost 1,800 fewer first preference votes than Nicky Kehoe had secured in 2002 on a slightly lower overall turnout. It was a serious blow in personal terms, and she told Banotti later: ‘When the fateful day arrives and the result is disappointing, it is gutting, it is very difficult personally.’ She went on a family holiday to Spain to get over it, but said in the same interview that, whether winning in 2004 or losing in 2007, ‘I found it an incredibly long process afterwards to try and get my head back together again’.
McDonald’s next electoral outing was in the European elections of 2009. A by-election was scheduled for the same date in Dublin Central to fill the vacancy left by the untimely death from cancer of the radical Independent TD Tony Gregory. Sinn Féin opted to run McDonald again for Europe, despite the fact that the Dublin Euroconstituency could now only elect three MEPs instead of the previous four. As its Dáil candidate the party ran Christy Burke, a long-time member of Dublin City Council and former republican prisoner.
Having won the last of four seats in the Dublin Euro-constituency in 2004, it was always going to be a challenge for her to get re-elected five years later, when the number of MEPs was reduced. McDonald did not retain her seat, and Burke likewise failed to get elected to the Dáil. But the local elections were held the same day and Burke kept his Council seat, then quit Sinn Féin three days later. In a piece on 3 December 2010, Phoenix magazine commented: ‘What galls many party members is that she could have won a Dáil seat in the last election if the right decisions were taken... McDonald failed to win a seat that Kehoe would have won in Dublin Central and Sinn Féin’s Joanna Spain lost in [Dublin] Mid-West where McDonald would also have won had she been a candidate.’
But she ran again for the Dáil in Dublin Central, in the 2011 general election. Fianna Fáil