destruction of the definition of the nation’. No such petition was launched in the end and plans for an intensive INC campaign to defend Articles 2 and 3 evaporated when Sinn Féin assented to the Good Friday pact. The organisation’s newsletter for January 1999 states that the INC adopted ‘a critical but not hostile approach’ to the Agreement and subsequent referendums.
While it may be technically correct to say that the INC, as an organisation, did not oppose the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement outright, it was clearly very unenthusiastic about elements of the deal, especially – but not exclusively – the changes in Articles 2 and 3. The newsletter states: ‘During the referenda campaign on the Belfast Agreement and constitutional changes, the INC launched a media campaign criticising the proposed wording as well as the indecent haste and lack of debate surrounding the amendments. To counteract the unanimously one-sided media coverage the INC also produced a Critique of the Belfast Agreement pointing out some of its shortcomings.’ The INC chair from 1989 to 1998, Robert Ballagh, declared his intention to vote No in the referendum held in the Republic. This was because the Irish territorial claim was being removed but the British one still remained. Secondly, he believed the Agreement was ‘flawed’ and did not guarantee peace.31
Initially, Gerry Adams indicated that Sinn Féin might well vote for the Agreement in the North and against it in the southern referendum, because of the proposed changes in Articles 2 and 3.Sinn Féin TD for Cavan-Monaghan, Caoimghín Ó Caoláin initially also expressed opposition to ‘any dilution or diminution of Articles 2 and 3’. But in the end, 331 out of the 350 Sinn Féin delegates at a special conference in Dublin on 10 May 1998 voted to accept the Agreement and, by implication, to vote Yes in both referendums.
McDonald told this writer that she was persuaded to join the INC by a Fianna Fáil activist, Nora Comiskey, a son of whom was a lifelong friend of Mary Lou’s husband. Nora Comiskey also persuaded her to join Fianna Fáil. Asked why she chose that party, she told me: ‘Probably a mixture of things, my family in the main, although it is not true to say all of them would have been Fianna Fáil. You know how this shakes down in terms of families that fell on one or other side of the Civil War politics. And then I had a very close friend who remains a close friend of mine, who is a lifelong Fianna Fáiler and a lifelong republican, Nora Comiskey’. McDonald joined a cumann (branch) of the party in the Dublin West constituency which encompassed Castleknock, where she lived at the time. Several long-time members from different wings of Fianna Fáil have insisted to me that she was ‘shafted’ by supporters of local TD and future, highly-respected finance minister Brian Lenihan Jr, who later died of cancer at the age of fifty-two. She equally-strongly rejects this version of events: ‘That’s not true. I don’t think that’s fair. I read these accounts that, “She left because she didn’t get a nomination for a seat”. I tell you – no such thing, and in no shape, manner or form was I shafted by the Lenihans or by anybody else.’ A long-time Fianna Fáil activist told me that ‘Lenihan ran her out of it’, and that this was bitterly resented in the McDonald camp. But Mary Lou is categoricaly insistent that, far from having her ambitions frustrated and blocked by the local party establishment, she felt instead that there was a lack of a serious social policy dimension in Fianna Fáil’s version of republicanism:
What happened was this. I arrived in: they were lovely people, Nora in particular. Everything was going along, happy days. I went to one meeting, I went to another meeting. There was a discussion, and I raised the idea of – I don’t think I even used the word ‘equality’, I think I used the word ‘equity’– and there was a kind of a puzzled intake of breath in the room.32
She addressed the party’s ardfheis, which was held at the Royal Dublin Society premises in November 1998. The issue was policing in Northern Ireland, and the Irish Times reported:
Ms Mary Lou McDonald, Dublin West, speaking on the reform of the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary, predecessor of the current Police Service of Northern Ireland], said the RUC was composed exclusively of people from one tradition and they were utterly incapable of carrying out fair policing. There had been victims who had died at the hands of the RUC. There needed to be root-and-branch change to the policing system.33
McDonald had the feeling that her interest in the North, especially the Orange Order dispute with nationalist residents in Portadown over its demand to march along the Garvaghy Road, was not widely shared in the party. This contributed to her decision to leave Fianna Fáil after about a year:
I had been active then on the parading issue in Garvaghy Road and all of that, and there was kind of a very mixed response to that within the party, and a level of disengagement. So it all amounted to me saying, you know, this is just the wrong place for me. It wasn’t to cast an aspersion on anybody else: it was the wrong place for me to be. That was the sense, so I was sort of a misfit in that whole scenario.34
Along with suggestions that her progress was obstructed in Fianna Fáil, there is an apparently contradictory claim that she turned down a nomination to run for a ‘safe’ council seat in the June 1999 local elections. She flatly denies this also: ‘Listen, I was neither shafted nor was I offered a seat. It didn’t arise.’ Asked how her move to Sinn Féin came about in the end, she says:
I suppose, first of all I knew some of the lads through the Irish National Congress, although that wasn’t the crucial thing... I remember going to a meeting in the Mansion House. Gerry [Adams] spoke at it, I can’t remember if Martin [McGuinness] spoke at it, I don’t think he did. But certainly Gerry spoke at it, and I just said to myself: ‘These people actually have their act together. And they know what they are doing’... Maybe it was a bit of a leap of faith on my part because I would have known certain individuals within Sinn Féin, but I wouldn’t have grown up in a place where Sinn Féin was organised and kind of a known quantity and all of that stuff... But it was just the politics of it sort of appealed to me: that blend of support for the peace process, Irish unity, all of that matters a great deal to me. But then, joined, inextricably bound up with that: social justice and social equality... For my politics, I wanted both of those things, I didn’t want a little bit of one or a little bit of the other, I wanted both of those things, so that’s where the Sinn Féin appeal was for me, and it was the right decision... The party was smaller at that stage, it was a more closed circle in a sense. So you arrived along as a kind of a new person in it; right enough, people take the measure of you and suss you out, which is all fair enough, but notwithstanding all of that I think I knew pretty quickly that I was in the right spot.
She believes the party is more open to new recruits nowadays: ‘I think for people joining now, perhaps particularly women, they come into a very different atmosphere and a very different environment.’ (There was a time when joining Sinn Féin might have led to some Garda surveillance because the IRA campaign was in full swing but McDonald says she did not experience any of that.)35
She told Alex Kane in 2013: ‘When I got politically involved, when I became active, I was looking for somewhere you could actually make a difference, and Sinn Féin provide that space. There’s a kind of stereotypical thing about what a ‘Shinner’ should look like and that doesn’t tally with the reality.’ Kane commented: ‘She was a perfect catch for Sinn Féin, exactly the sort of person they needed: the sort of person who would normally have pursued a career in Fianna Fáil. She was young, bright, articulate and attractive.’3636 A general election was called in the Republic in 2002, and McDonald was chosen as the Sinn Féin candidate in Dublin West. This was her first time to run for public office and she secured 2,404 votes, equivalent to 8.02 per cent of first preferences. Coming seventh in a field of nine, she was eliminated on the third count. Brian Lenihan Jr topped the poll for Fianna Fáil, with Trotskyist candidate Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party (who got almost half of Mary Lou’s transfers under the Irish system of proportional representation), and Labour’s Joan Burton, taking the other two seats.37
Her internal rise in Sinn Féin has been a rapid one. In 2001, she became a member of the ardchomhairle (executive council); four years later she succeeded Mitchel
