– currently abstentionist MP for West Tyrone – as vice-president. McDonald attracted controversy when she took part in a commemoration ceremony at the statue of former IRA leader Seán Russell in Dublin’s Fairview Park on 17 August 2003. A photograph in the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht for 21 August 2003 shows McDonald, at this stage a declared candidate in the following June’s elections to the European Parliament, smiling benignly at Belfast republican Brian Keenan, who gave the main oration.
Born in Fairview, Russell took part in the 1916 Rising and sided with the anti-Treaty IRA through the Civil War and beyond. In 1926, he was part of a mission to buy arms in the Soviet Union. In 1938 he was appointed chief of staff of the IRA. Regarding itself as the true government of Ireland, the organisation declared war on Britain in January 1939 and began a campaign of bomb attacks on British targets, especially electricity supply-points. An apolitical militarist, Russell did not care who provided arms to the republican movement and took very literally republican father-figureWolfe Tone’s dictum that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. He travelled to the US to drum up support, got arrested, skipped bail, secured passage on a steamer heading for Italy and, in May 1940, ended up in Berlin. After three months’ training in explosives, he headed back to Ireland on a German U-boat in the company of Spanish Civil War veteran Frank Ryan, who had just been released from one of Franco’s prisons into German hands. However, Russell became ill and died at sea on 14 August 1940, with the result that the mission was aborted. Reporting on Keenan’s speech in Fairview, An Phoblacht said:
Brian reviewed the strange history of Seán Russell from his birth in Fairview in 1893 to his death at the end [sic] of the Second World War. He talked about the part Russell had played during the ‘20s and the ‘30s in the ideological disputes surrounding the RepublicanCongress and the formation of Saor Éire, and his role, as IRA Chief of Staff, in the disastrous campaign in England during the Second World War […] ‘I don’t know,’ Brian acknowledged, ‘what was in the depth of Seán Russell’s thinking down the years, but I am sure he was never far from Pearse’s own position, who said, ‘as a patriot, preferring death to slavery, I know no other way’.38
Keenan, who died of cancer five years later, was himself the mastermind of an IRA bombing campaign that unsettled London in the mid-1970s. He was jailed for eighteen years in 1980 for his involvement in the deaths of eight people, including author and broadcaster Ross McWhirter, who had offered a £50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of IRA bombers, and oncologist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, one of several people killed by car bombs.39 Earlier, Keenan had travelled extensively to establish contacts in East Germany, Lebanon and Syria, and negotiate arms deals for the IRA, most notably with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi in 1972. But following his release on parole in 1993, Keenan used his influence to persuade the IRA leadership to embrace the peace process. At his funeral, members of the Balcombe Street Siege group - the IRA unit that Keenan organised in England in the mid-1970s - carried his coffin.
Two weeks after the Fairview ceremony, columnist Kevin Myers castigated McDonald in the Irish Times for her participation in a ceremony to honour a ‘filthy wretch’, whose collaboration with the Nazis took place after Hitler had publicly pledged to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Noting that McDonald was a candidate in the European elections, Myers wondered what she would say to her parliamentary colleagues if ‘by some extraordinary freak’ she won the seat: ‘At the EU bar, would she break into a jolly rendition of Horst Wessel [the Nazi Party anthem], a beer tankard in her hand?’40 The issue surfaced again, inevitably, in the run-up to the European elections. The weekend before the 11 June polling day, Fianna Fáil candidate Eoin Ryan said Keenan was a senior IRA figure who had served a prison sentence in England for explosives offences. He added:
The people of Dublin and Ireland should know the kind of company Mary Lou McDonald keeps. And what of the person McDonald and Keenan gathered together to ‘pay respect’ to – Seán Russell, a self-proclaimed ally of Hitler, Nazi Germany and former leader of the IRA.
A Sinn Féin spokesman responded: ‘I think Eoin Ryan should look at his own party’s history before starting to throw around accusations... considering Eamon de Valera signed a book of condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler.’41 Myers returned to the subject twice more in his ‘Irishman’s Diary’ column, most notably on 1 February 2005, the year after the election, when he wrote: ‘Not merely has Mary Lou McDonald increased in size since her election to the European Parliament, but she is the only MEP who has publicly honoured a Nazi quisling... When Big Mac gave the keynote [sic] oration for Russell, she was truly speaking the language of Sinn Féin-IRA and its weird, demented ethos... Big Mac is just junk.’
McDonald told this writer she had no regrets over her participation in the Russell ceremony:
No, I mean, for God’s sake, if you could criticise anything, you would criticise factions within the IRA at different stages that had such a militarist view on things that they didn’t see broader politics.I don’t think for one minute that Russell was an arch-Nazi or a Nazi supporter. The facts actually, if viewed rationally don’t support that case, but that’s what Myers is trying to do. But at that time if I recall, Kevin Myers had taken a good number of side-swipes and hard runs at me. That is his prerogative but – pretty nasty stuff!
Asked if it hurt to be attacked in that way, she replied:
Not hurt I was more taken aback by it, because I suppose I hadn’t been through, like others, the school of hard knocks. Bear this in mind: one day I was going about minding my own business, then, when I ran in that European election in 2004, literally within a matter of months, anywhere you would go people knew your name and recognised you.That’s quite a transition for a person, in a very quick period of time. And then you get the criticism and you have to take it, but it throws you a little bit off balance. Nowadays, it wouldn’t have that effect on me at all, but that’s just experience and the value of growing older.
(The Russell statue was vandalised in December 2004 by an unnamed group who said in a statement he was a Nazi collaborator; it was later repaired.)
Regarding the response to her European candidacy, she told Banotti (a grand-niece of rebel leader and founder of the Free State, Michael Collins): ‘The only thing that irked me, as a woman, was the suggestion, sometimes said up-front and sometimes just implied, that I was maybe cute but not that bright. They were saying that this woman was being run because she was being groomed as the new face of Sinn Féin and she was respectable. And never a thought that maybe this is a capable person, someone who has the confidence of those she works with to go out and do this job. This irritated me, but I suppose it was par for the course.’
It would have been interesting to see the reaction of former neighbours in the leafy suburbs to her election campaign, but the party wasn’t having any of that. Alison O’Connor wrote in the Sunday Business Post: ‘A request to see McDonald, who grew up in the south Dublin suburb of Rathgar, canvassing in her heartland of middle-class Dublin was ignored. Instead, an initial offer came to accompany her on a canvass of an inner-city flats complex, and eventually an old local authority estate in Crumlin.’42
Journalist Michael O’Regan wrote with foresight, six months in advance of the June 2004 European contest: ‘Dublin could provide Sinn Féin with its first Euro MEP in Ms Mary Lou McDonald, who polled 2,404 first preference votes in Dublin West in the 2002 general election. The party has since grown in strength in the capital, with Ms McDonald’s profile increasing. Political observers notice that she was given a very high profile by the party during the Northern elections, posing for photographs and television cameras with the leader, Mr Gerry Adams.’43 It was an indication of the effort being put into the campaign and the reception it was getting that the pseudonymous Drapier column in the Irish Times reported hearing that a rally in the middle-class suburb of Dundrum in south Dublin on 30 March, where Adams and McDonald were speaking, drew ‘a huge overflow attendance with the crowd in the hall spilled outside’.44
Meanwhile,
