Mary Lou faces an uphill battle trying to persuade the public that Gerry really has gone away
AS GERRY Adams announced his resignation as Sinn Féin president in front of a large and emotionally charged audience, the curtain went down on a fascinating and turbulent chapter in modern Irish history.
The Adams era, an uninterrupted 34year reign at the head of a polarising but pivotal party, in terms of the Northern Ireland peace process, was finally over and not arguably before its time.
Adams, despite his success as a peacemaker, still attracts bile and loathing in some quarters, but even among his fawning admirers there was quiet acknowledgement that it was time to go.
Sinn Féin is now the third largest party in the Dáil, and its impatience for power is palpable.
Whereas before it insisted on only entering government as a senior partner, it is now prepared to countenance having a minority stake. As a continuous and painful reminder of the IRA’s campaign of terror, Adams was a stumbling block, the party’s Achilles’ heel.
His leave-taking is an attempt to create a new era for Sinn Féin, a big push to put the past behind it and project itself as a democratic and law-abiding party, unlike the shady and deeply distrusted political machine that seriously cranked into action after the 1998 Good Friday peace deal.
This, it reckons, is the time. Its populist appeal makes it a potential bedfellow for the two mainstream parties who, according to opinion polls, are unlikely to win majorities in forthcoming general elections.
On top of that, some of the new breed of Sinn Féin politicians – Pearse Doherty, Eoin Ó Broin, Mary Lou McDonald – are among the Dáil’s most talented and articulate performers. Their hands, unlike Adams’s, are untainted by the blooddrenched Troubles era, during which some 3,600 people lost their lives, many as a result of IRA atrocities.
As the Dáil’s most visible link to that brutal past, Adams – who, despite denials, is generally assumed to have been the IRA’s leading military strategist – was the single greatest obstacle to a coalition deal for Sinn Féin.
His successor is widely presumed to be Mary Lou McDonald, a privately educated Dubliner whose first political home was in Fianna Fáil. She bears the scent of Chanel No.5 rather than the whiff of cordite, with none of her leader’s repellent baggage.
The hope is that with Mary Lou as its squeaky-clean face, Sinn Féin, support for which is stalling, will become more palatable to voters and also to rival parties who, up to now, have regarded it with an expression of what can only be described as barely concealed disgust.
But while Mary Lou McDonald prepares to take the torch from her formidable predecessor, she must also shoulder the considerable task of convincing the electorate that she is genuinely a new broom.
She sounds like a middle-class Dubliner and is from the same urban-based generation that currently dominates the Dáil: Leo Varadkar, Paschal Donohoe, et al.
She is educated, a mother, and has never shouldered the coffin of an IRA bomber. She is the furthest thing imaginable from the bad old days of militant republicanism when men in balaclavas fired shots over the coffins of their fallen comrades.
Influence
All that is certainly reassuring, but will it be enough to sway the electorate that the transformation is more than skindeep, or that Mary Lou is not just providing a patina of respectability for a party that is still, at heart, a murky and shadowy organisation?
It is the case, for instance, that even with Gerry Adams out of the picture, he will still exercise considerable influence behind-the-scenes.
In an RTÉ interview yesterday he said that although he is stepping down as president, he will remain an activist in Sinn Féin, prepared to do whatever the party asks of him.
Might Adams still be the puppet master and Mary Lou McDonald his acquiescent marionette or mouthpiece?
The party has also long been dogged by suspicions that an anonymous cadre of activists in west Belfast are pulling its strings.
The strange manner of Michelle O’Neill’s election as party leader in the North did not exactly give rise for confidence in the party’s commitment to the democratic values of openness and transparency.
The relentless accusations of bullying and intimidation by disenchanted and former Sinn Féin members suggest that the party is like a cult, brooking no dissent, shrouded in secrecy, and with a rigid discipline imposed from the top ranks.
Sinn Féin’s refusal to take its seats in the Northern Executive, at a time when the voice of the anti-Brexiteers needs to be heard, shows a streak of irresponsible game-playing at a crucial juncture and does not bode well for a party with ambitions to govern.
Up to now, at least, Mary Lou McDonald has been happy to turn a blind eye to the party’s unsavoury past and to gloss over evidence that suggests it’s still attached to the old IRA apparatus.
The Northern Bank raid – one of the most audacious robberies ever in this part of the world, which saw masked IRA men rob £26.5million from a Belfast City bank – took place in 2004, but it’s one of many IRA legacies that still have the potential to embarrass the party.
A few years ago, the WikiLeaks cables contradicted Sinn Féin’s flat denial of IRA involvement and showed that Gerry Adams had full knowledge of IRA plans for the heist, even though he was negotiating at the time to try to save the peace process.
Two years ago, Micheál Martin asked the Dáil if it could be sure that ‘any of the proceeds from the organised crime that’s been going on by alleged individual Provo republicans is not finding its way into the political project’.
The Fianna Fáil leader went on to highlight how three people prosecuted in relation to handling the stolen funds from the Northern Bank robbery had ties to Sinn Féin.
Perhaps a combination of pragmatism and political ambition allowed Mary Lou to practically glow with pride about her party almost every time she was challenged in public about its transgressive past.
She never gave an inch to Sinn Féin detractors, but she might have to start now if she wants to steer her party onto the government benches.
If she wants to convince us that this is really a bright new dawn for Sinn Féin then, for the first time ever, she may have to distance herself from the horrors of past IRA activity and do all she can to rid her party of the last vestiges of its paramilitary links.
Granted, now may not be the hour, given her loyalty to Gerry Adams and her desire to pay homage to him as a man of peace.
Time will tell whether Mary Lou McDonald continues to toe the tired party line, or chooses to decisively renounce its dreadful past.
But if she wants to persuade us that Sinn Féin is fully embracing democracy, she must take the latter course.