Mary Lou McDonald takes over as Sinn Fein party leader

LONDON — Mary Lou McDonald took over as leader of the Sinn Fein party Saturday, ending Gerry Adams’ three decades at the helm with a sweeping speech that touched on everything from abortion to Brexit and promised a united Ireland “in our time.”

McDonald, 48, is the first woman to lead the party, and the first Sinn Fein leader with no direct connection to Ireland’s period of violence known as the Troubles. Her confirmation as leader came at a conference Saturday attended by some 2,000 delegates in Dublin.

“We must only agree that the past is never again repeated,” she said. “On other things, we can agree to disagree. The poet Maya Angelou put it well: ‘History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if faced with courage, need not be lived again.’”

She takes over for Adams, a divisive politician who was the face of the Irish republican movement as it shifted from violence to peace. The end of Adams’ tenure marks a new era for the party, which wants to unite the United Kingdom’s Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland to the south.

Adams, who announced in November he was stepping down after almost 35 years, was the key figure in the peace process that saw the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the formation of a powersharing government between Northern Ireland’s pro-British and republican factions.