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Power Play. Deaglán de Bréadún
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isbn 9781785370434
Автор произведения Deaglán de Bréadún
Издательство Ingram
Mary Lou’s first involvement in politics came in the mid-1990s when she joined the Irish National Congress (INC), a campaign group which promotes the aims and ideals of Irish republicanism on a non-party basis. The INC was originally set up in 1989, under the chairmanship of leading artist Robert Ballagh, to prepare for the 75th anniversary of the 1916 Rising two years later. In the anti-republican, revisionist climate of the time, official celebrations were going to be quite modest and far different in scale from what would later be planned for the centenary in 2016.
McDonald and Finian McGrath, who was subsequently elected to the Dáil as an Independent, both served in the position of leas -chathaoirleach (vice-chair) of the organisation in the mid-90s. McDonald chaired the organisation for a year from March 2000.27 McGrath told me:
The idea was, we were trying to do a copy of the ANC [African National Congress] in South Africa, because Mandela was on the way into power at the time and we just had this idea of having a broad republican nationalist front that would include every [individual or organisation]– including Sinn Féin, including independents like myself – that had a national vision for the country.
McGrath says that they worked closely as joint vice-chairs of the INC: ‘She was a fantastic speaker, a woman of great belief. She had a great vision for our country at the time and was also very proactive in developing and supporting the early stages of the peace process, when a lot of people were hostile to it.’28 The INC newsletter of April 2000 which announced her appointment as chair by the national executive also declared the organisation’s intention to hold ‘an anti-sectarian protest’ in Dublin on 28 May.29 This was in opposition to a proposed march by the Dublin and Wicklow lodge of the Orange Order and the unveiling of a plaque at 59 Dawson Street, in the city centre, where the first meeting of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was held on 9 April 1798.
The Order sees itself as an unapologetic defender of Protestant civil and religious liberties, but its critics, with equal forthrightness, claim that its activities are damaging to community relations.There were major tensions and disturbances in Northern Ireland on an annual basis over a proposed Orange Order march through a nationalist area on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown. The INC was very involved in this issue, and McDonald herself visited the scene. The parade in Dublin was called-off and the counter-demonstrators were accused of intimidation. In a letter published in the Irish Times on 10 May, McDonald rejected this allegation and the notion that the Order had been ‘demonised’ by herself and other critics.
On 28 May, Dublin’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Mary Freehill of the Labour Party, unveiled the Dawson Street plaque. No one from the Orange Order was present but the Irish Times reported that the crowd of about 150 included a ‘bevy’ of protesters from the INC: ‘These carried placards with messages such as “Dublin says No to sectarianism”, as well as a mock Orange banner comparing the Order to the Ku Klux Klan. A spokeswoman, Ms Mary Lou McDonald, said the Congress was not opposed to the unveiling of the plaque. The protesters were there to register their “strenuous objections” to the way the Lord Mayor had engaged with the Orange Order. She accused Cllr Freehill of failing to recognise the scale of the sectarian problem in Ireland and of ‘ingratiating’ herself with an organisation “which continues to foster division and fear”.30 The Lord Mayor was quoted as saying that, ‘the Order represents a significant strand in the politics and culture of those claiming a British-Irish identity. It is part of our shared history and should be recognised as such’.
In a letter published on 27 June in the Irish Times, McDonald said one of the reasons for the INC demonstration was ‘to remind elected representatives of their responsibility to defend the right of Irish citizens to live free from sectarian harassment, as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement’. Responding in the letters page on 3 July, Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group said she was ‘delighted to learn that the INC now seems to be accepting the Agreement which it strongly opposed in 1998’. Replying, McDonald said that, ‘contrary to Ms Clancy’s assertion, the Irish National Congress did not oppose the Good Friday Agreement’. She reiterated in an interview for this book that the INC did not oppose the Agreement, although there were ‘mixed views’ about it among the membership. ‘The Articles 2 and 3 issue was very, very “angsty” for the Irish National Congress,’ she said, adding that she did not share those concerns. ‘At the time that issue of Articles 2 and 3 was huge for nationalist Ireland, I suppose most markedly for people in the South.’
Separate referendums were held on the two sides of the border in the aftermath of the successful conclusion of multi-party talks at Stormont’s Castle Buildings on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. The electorate in the Republic were asked to vote on a new version of Articles 2 and 3 which accepted that the North could not become part of a united Ireland without the consent of a majority in each jurisdiction. A front-page report in the Sunday Business Post on 15 March 1998 said the Irish Government was proposing to change Articles 2 and 3 without any meaningful quid pro quo from the British, and that ‘the Irish National Congress is to launch a petition next week among the North’s 675,000 nationalists to protest at the Government’s planned action which the INC holds is a devastating destruction of the definition of the nation’. No such petition was launched in the end and plans for an intensive INC campaign to defend Articles 2 and 3 evaporated when Sinn Féin assented to the Good Friday pact. The organisation’s newsletter for January 1999 states that the INC adopted ‘a critical but not hostile approach’ to the Agreement and subsequent referendums.
While it may be technically correct to say that the INC, as an organisation, did not oppose the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement outright, it was clearly very unenthusiastic about elements of the deal, especially – but not exclusively – the changes in Articles 2 and 3. The newsletter states: ‘During the referenda campaign on the Belfast Agreement and constitutional changes, the INC launched a media campaign criticising the proposed wording as well as the indecent haste and lack of debate surrounding the amendments. To counteract the unanimously one-sided media coverage the INC also produced a Critique of the Belfast Agreement pointing out some of its shortcomings.’ The INC chair from 1989 to 1998, Robert Ballagh, declared his intention to vote No in the referendum held in the Republic. This was because the Irish territorial claim was being removed but the British one still remained. Secondly, he believed the Agreement was ‘flawed’ and did not guarantee peace.31
Initially, Gerry Adams indicated that Sinn Féin might well vote for the Agreement in the North and against it in the southern referendum, because of the proposed changes in Articles 2 and 3.Sinn Féin TD for Cavan-Monaghan, Caoimghín Ó Caoláin initially also expressed opposition to ‘any dilution or diminution of Articles 2 and 3’. But in the end, 331 out of the 350 Sinn Féin delegates at a special conference in Dublin on 10 May 1998 voted to accept the Agreement and, by implication, to vote Yes in both referendums.
McDonald told this writer that she was persuaded to join the INC by a Fianna Fáil activist, Nora Comiskey, a son of whom was a lifelong friend of Mary Lou’s husband. Nora Comiskey also persuaded her to join Fianna Fáil. Asked why she chose that party, she told me: ‘Probably a mixture of things, my family in the main, although it is not true to say all of them would have been Fianna Fáil. You know how this shakes down in terms of families that fell on one or other side of the Civil War politics. And then I had a very close friend who remains a close friend of mine, who is a lifelong Fianna Fáiler and a lifelong republican, Nora Comiskey’. McDonald joined a cumann (branch) of the party in the Dublin West constituency which encompassed Castleknock, where she lived at the time. Several long-time members from different wings of Fianna Fáil have insisted to me that she was ‘shafted’ by supporters of local TD and future, highly-respected finance minister Brian Lenihan Jr, who later died of cancer at the age of fifty-two. She equally-strongly rejects this version of events: ‘That’s not true. I don’t think that’s fair. I read these accounts that, “She left because she didn’t get a nomination for a seat”. I tell you – no such thing, and in no shape, manner or form was I shafted by the Lenihans or by anybody else.’ A long-time Fianna Fáil activist told me that ‘Lenihan ran her out of it’, and that this was bitterly resented in the McDonald camp. But Mary Lou is categoricaly insistent that,