Want to see what SF would do? Look north
Why would any decent, right-thinking person actively choose Sinn Fein to run this country, asks Mairia Cahill
MARY Lou McDonald accused both the Taoiseach and Micheal Martin of hypocrisy last week when they ruled out a Sinn Fein coalition, given their support for the recent deal in the North which saw the party back after a three-year paid hiatus. Both pointed out their moral problem with Sinn Fein, and that’s fair enough; Sinn Fein’s response to scandals of IRA sex abuse and murder have been routinely raised as legitimate concerns. A fear that other future skeletons will fall out of the cupboard and collectively haunt an entire cabinet is a very real prospect.
These are the sorts of things that Sinn Fein expects the media and voters to turn a blind eye to during this election, as if they are non-events now Adams is no longer officially at the helm. Yet McDonald, who makes big noises about Sinn Fein’s internal democracy, has been a member of the party since 1998 and in a position of leadership since 2001.
Only last week she was asked on radio whether Gerry Adams had ever been in the IRA and reiterated that she believed his denials. She must be gambling that few care anyway.
Maybe they don’t. Though they should very much take note of what sort of government they can expect under Sinn Fein; they only need to look to their record of governing in a coalition in the North for that.
Sinn Fein entered the NI Executive in 1998. In August and September 2001, a former British secretary of state suspended the assembly for 24 hours, respectively, to buy time to attempt to resolve the row over IRA decommissioning. In 2000, the assembly was suspended over the IRA’s failure to put its weapons demonstrably beyond use.
In 2002, Unionists walked out of government after police raided Sinn Fein offices in Stormont while investigating allegations of IRA intelligence gathering. No one was convicted, and the collapse of prosecutorial processes against three individuals led to the outing of Denis Donaldson as a British agent. He was Sinn Fein’s most senior staff member at Stormont, and was murdered in Donegal in 2006.
In January 2017, Sinn Fein collapsed the institutions, citing the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme (RHI) as the reason, and vowed never to return while Arlene Foster remained first minister.
They recently re-entered the executive led by First Minister Foster after negotiating the “New Decade, New Approach” deal; which included a litany of promises to voters but subsequently caused concerns when it emerged that politicians agreed the package without actually nailing down finance.
In short, they collectively agreed to a deal costing approximately £6bn, without having any money on the table. Now, if Fine Gael or Fianna Fail announced on budget day they had no idea how much they had to spend, they would be accused of being a bunch of amateurs, and not without foundation. In fact, the most important aspect of any finance minister’s role is to produce a budget.
In 2017, Sinn Fein’s Mairtin O Muilleoir failed to deliver a budget by the time his party walked out of the executive, collapsing Stormont in the process. O Muilleoir has been referred to a number of times during this election campaign, largely due to his appearance at the RHI Inquiry referred to by Sam McBride in his book Burned: “Unknown to the public, O Muilleoir was in constant contact with unseen — and therefore publicly unaccountable senior republican figures…”
Will Pearse ‘when I’m finance minister’ Doherty do the same? (As an aside, before I waived my anonymity, Pearse Doherty stood on the plinth and stated Micheal Martin’s assertion that the IRA had investigated sex abuse was “a new low” and “unfounded and untrue”. He has yet to apologise to either me or Martin, despite being repeatedly asked to do so.)
Northern Ireland is in a perilous place, despite Sinn Fein sitting in Stormont’s governing executive over a 20-year period. During that time, they have held multiple ministerial portfolios.
NI has the highest suicide rate in the UK. Five people take their own lives each week, and for the last three years, when we could have had a government to tackle this issue, Sinn Fein preferred to stay out of an executive over lack of Irish language provision.
Last week, McDonald described the HSE as “chaotic, overcrowded and broken” and appealed to voters to vote Sinn Fein to bring about change in this and other areas. But in Northern Ireland, nurses have been striking because their pay is not on a par with their counterparts in England — and although parity is now promised, the health service in NI is groaning due to a myriad of other issues. My own daughter, Saorlaith, had to wait five years to see a consultant. Sinn Fein held the Stormont health ministry twice.
A while ago Saorlaith’s school principal wrote to parents to ask if they could contribute £1 per week, as her school had suffered a net loss of funding of 12pc since 2008, and was struggling to fund special educational needs, after-schools, staffing and other services.
The school is not unique, with another principal telling a select affairs committee that some parents were donating toilet rolls to alleviate pressures. Sinn Fein held education ministries from 1999 to 2016.
Sinn Fein have told the southern electorate that they will protect the most vulnerable. They told the people of the North this also — right before they voted with the DUP to hand welfare reform powers back to the Tories. They then spent the next few years blaming “Tory austerity” for every problem going.
Every public sector of Northern Ireland is creaking, roads are badly in need of upgrade, and food bank usage is rising. Over 20,000 people were classified as statutorily homeless last year. It isn’t getting better.
Yet, at a key time for the country as a whole, Sinn Fein stayed out of government in NI for three years, and instead of taking their seats in Westminster as legislators do, preferred to act as a glorified lobby group spouting about Brexit and unity, while the Irish Government stepped up and stood up for Ireland’s interests.
Northern Ireland has a D’Hondt system, meaning coalition is mandatory on a cross-community basis. The Dail is different. Why then, would any right-thinking person — let alone Martin or Varadkar — actively choose them to run this country?
Instead of criticising Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, perhaps Sinn Fein should account for its own rate of delivery. It’s not exactly an exemplary record. As Mary Lou McDonald is fond of saying, the buck now stops with her.
‘Northern Ireland has the highest suicide rate in the UK. Five people take their own lives each week’