Set to be First Minister, the woman steeped in IRA history
NORTHERN Ireland’s new First Minister-elect Michelle O’Neill was brought up in one of the most notorious battlegrounds of the Troubles. And the family of the deputy leader of Sinn Fein were deeply involved in the clashes in East Tyrone.
Her cousin, Tony Doris, was one of three IRA men killed in an SAS ambush in 1991, when O’Neill was 14.
The terrorists were on their way to attack an off-duty soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment when they were intercepted. It is suspected a double agent within the IRA had tipped off the security services.
Doris, 21, and his accomplices were burned beyond recognition after their car burst into flames as it crossed from Londonderry into Tyrone at Croagh.
Another cousin, Gareth Doris, was involved in a high explosives attack on the police base at Coalisland in 1997 only a year before the Good Friday Agreement which was to bring peace was signed.
Again, anti-terrorist officers were waiting, and unleashed a hail of bullets. Doris survived the attack after surgery. He was sentenced to ten years in jail but, because of the Good Friday Agreement, he was released in less than three.
Mrs O’Neill’s father, too, was an IRA member. Quite what his role was remains unclear, but he was interned at the Maze Prison at the height of the Troubles, and spent time in other jails, including Crumlin Road in Belfast, Armagh and Magilligan.
All of which tends to undermine the modern image the glamorous mother-oftwo, with her carefully dyed hair and painted nails, seeks to portray.
She was meant to represent a break from the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, key architects of the republican campaign for decades.
BUT, of course, neither Mrs O’Neill nor Dublin-based Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein’s president, could hope to run what was the political voice of the IRA without the say-so of the men who wielded so much power over the years.
They are, in many ways, politically acceptable front-women as they work Ireland from both the North and the Republic to foster their aims of re-unification.
In what is a seismic moment for politics in Northern Ireland, she becomes the first Sinn Fein leader to knock the unionists off their perch at Stormont.
The 45-year-old, born in County Cork shortly after the height of the Troubles, has served as deputy First Minister under the DUP’s Arlene Foster and Paul Givan since 2020. And after yesterday’s results, Mrs O’Neill, viewed as the glitzy face of new Sinn Fein politics, could well earn the title of First Minister in a historic vote.
She joined Sinn Fein only after the Good Friday Agreement was signed – at the time, she was 21 and married with a child – and worked for the MP Francie Molloy for seven years until 2005.
Her first foray into electoral politics was taking the council seat vacated by her father, before being elected to represent Mid Ulster in the 2007 assembly election.
In the midst of her legislative assembly commitments, in 2010 she became the first woman mayor of Dungannon and South Tyrone.
She was quickly promoted to minister for agriculture in 2011. In 2016 she announced she would scrap the lifetime ban on gay and bisexual men donating blood in Northern Ireland – just eight days after becoming minister of health. She stepped into the role of Deputy First Minister the following year – chosen ahead of former IRA member Conor Murphy.
She has since, predictably, been calling for a referendum on Ireland’s reunification in response to Brexit.
In 2018, she succeeded Miss McDonald as the vice president of Sinn Fein, and comfortably survived a leadership challenge a year later.
SHE has come under criticism for her attendance at funerals and commemorations of IRA members, however. In February she was pictured at the unveiling of a memorial dedicated to three members shot dead during the Troubles, while she apologised for her attendance at the funeral of former IRA leader Bobby Storey during lockdown last year.