Toughen up, Mary Lou, advises FG minister
THE Arts and Culture Minister Heather Humphreys has told Sinn Féin’s deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald to ‘toughen up and realise you are in the Premier League’.
Ms Humphreys was commenting on Ms McDonald’s response to her high-profile spat with Leo Varadkar this week after the Taoiseach had compared her to Marine Le Pen and noted that she appeared to be very cranky.
Subsequently, Ms McDonald said gender was a key factor in Irish politics and that many politicians ‘play the woman and not the ball’.
She added that the Taoiseach had been ‘facile and dismissive on important issues’.
The Arts Minister weighed in to defend the Taoiseach’s progressive position on gender issues and questioned the sensitivity of Ms McDonald.
Ms Humphreys commented: ‘Mary Lou is in the Premier League. She should get on with it. ‘Politics is a difficult trade, but it is a difficult trade for everyone, male or female.’ Meanwhile, senior Fine Gael sources have claimed that Varadkar’s attacks on Sinn Féin are actually part of a strategy to marginalise Fianna Fáil. One said: ‘This is actually Leo’s Von Schlieffen plan; feint towards Sinn Féin, but the real target is Fianna Fáil.’
A minister told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The big-ticket item is to ensure that the next election is Fine Gael versus Sinn Féin, with Fianna Fáil being the irrelevant piggy in the middle.
‘We will be the party of tax cuts and opportunity, with Sinn Féin as the party of an economic wasteland being let in the back door by a weak Fianna Fáil. That is the narrative.’