Quit bleating and clean up your backyard, Mary Lou
SINN Féin has made some missteps since firing the starting gun on their concerted attempt to make political capital out of an urban tragedy. The first was Mary Lou’s tweet of a photograph of a drunk man, a can of beer fixed to his face at pick-up time outside a building she mistakenly claimed was Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire, on Parnell Square, while fuming to her followers that no lessons had been learned from the riots.
Louise O’Reilly also waved the photograph in the Dáil chamber, highlighting how it was still seedy business as usual around the school.
Both politicians were excoriated for exploiting a vulnerable person for political gain. But a bigger own goal was surely their mistakenly identifying a building doors up from the school as Choláiste Mhuire.
Sinn Féin’s Dublin headquarters is just a few minutes away from the school. The school is also located in the party leader’s Dublin Central constituency.
Has the party grown so out of touch with its local grassroots that it doesn’t know where the national school is situated? A lowly councillor in rural Ireland wouldn’t make that rookie error.
The deputies’ hysterical reaction to the wretched man skulling cans in broad daylight also stretched credulity.
Behaving like yummie mummies having attacks of the vapours at the sight of a down and out is completely disingenuous from two battlehardened street fighters like Mary Lou and Louise O’Reilly.
Mary Lou tops the poll in the north inner city. If she doesn’t know by now that open drug dealing, petty thieving and vandalism are part of the scene, then she should set up her stall in her native Rathgar.
THE Sinn Féin leader bleats about the riots on her social media. She complains: ‘Everybody saw that coming... Here in Dublin, people don’t feel safe…’ She says: ‘We have less garda on the beat than in 2009 even though we have a larger population. Garda stations have been closed down. Communities have not been invested in….’ But what has she done about it? The north inner city may be one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country, its atmosseach phere often on a knife-edge, particularly since lockdown took its toll and waves of immigration turned it into a cultural melting point.
But for all its problems, it is not lacking in political firepower.
The Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe and the Leader of the Opposition, Mary Lou McDonald – two of the most powerful politicians in the land – are based in the constituency yet on their watch the place has gone to rack and ruin. Enda Kenny, as a taoi
from the west of Ireland, showed a commitment to the area when it was beset by gangland violence. As taoiseach, Charlie Haughey spearheaded the renewal of Temple Bar from a down-at-heel wasteland into a cultural quarter. The failed social experiment in tower blocks that was Ballymun came to an end in 1997 when Ballymun Regeneration was established, and Bertie Ahern became taoiseach.
THRE is a template for political leadership in renewal projects and urban investment, but Mary Lou and Paschal Donohoe have preferred to abandon a part of their constituency to anarchy and lawlessness. They seem to take no pride in the place or feel they belong.
Yet the decay in the north inner city does not just destroy the social fabric of the area or local lives; the ripples effect business, tourism, the country’s international reputation and future prospects on the world stage.
Who would give a fig for a country that can’t keep the main thoroughfare of its capital city, a street steeped in history with cultural jewels like the Hugh Lane Gallery and the Gate Theatre on its periphery safe for locals and visitors?
Sinn Féin may figure on holding Minister for Justice Helen McEntee to account for recent events. But it should also look to Mary Lou who, notwithstanding her fondness for populist fairground barking, has never championed the poorest section of her electoral backyard.