among them being the eloquent and feisty Independent Senator David Norris. ‘It wasn’t so much that he taught – he performed! And it was absolutely brilliant,’ she told me. The prominent Kerry-born poet and academic Brendan Kennelly also gets full marks from Deputy McDonald: ‘Brilliant in tutorials, a really good teacher, very affable and very connected with the students.’20 Despite the impact the hunger strikes had on her when she was younger and her parents’ interest in political issues, she kept aloof from such involvement at TCD. This seems strange in light of her later activity, since for many people it is their only period of activism. How was she able to keep clear of the political arena? ‘Well, actually, with relative ease, because I liked my books, I liked my friends and I always worked when I was in college. So I always kept myself very well out of it.’21 Her mind was on the glories of literature in the Saxon tongue: ‘I liked all the Anglo-Irish [writers]. I particularly liked Beckett’s theatre. I know it’s very dark: I got a kick out of that. I liked the Metaphysical Poets and American literature. I went through a phase of Sylvia Plath; I think every college student does.’22 She had a break abroad before the end of the four-year degree course: ‘I took a year out when I was studying in Trinity and I went to live in Almeria, in Andalucia, in the south of Spain. It was after third year: a gap year. I taught there – the typical kind of thing.’ She still heads off to Spain for a holiday when she gets a chance. After the Easter break in 2012, Labour’s Pat Rabbitte responded to her latest criticism of the Government in the Dáil with the memorable quip: ‘Such tanned indignation!’23
After graduation from Trinity she spent a year at the University of Limerick (UL), where she took a Master’s degree: ‘That was in European Integration Studies: law, economics, politics. I think I was the only person in the class that didn’t have a degree in Economics or European Studies.’24 When asked what motivated the shift from English Literature to European Studies, she says she had an interest in the European Union and its institutions: ‘I go on instinct on lots of things. I didn’t have a masterplan where I carefully plotted-out every step of a career-path... That’s self-evident!’25 After UL, she worked as a researcher in a Dublin-based think tank, the Institute of International and European Affairs. The IIEA was founded in 1990 by former general secretary of the Labour Party, Brendan Halligan.‘I went on to Dublin City University (DCU) where I started my PhD. It was in Industrial Relations/Human Resource Management.’ This was meant to be a follow-up to her MA thesis at UL which was concerned with the 1993 re-organisation of the state airline, Aer Lingus. ‘I was in the IIEA, went into DCU, was working away, did some teaching, working away on my research, and then I went to the Irish Productivity Centre, to work as a consultant.’26 Romance enters the story too: during the heady days of 1990, when the nation was buoyed with hope because of the Irish soccer team’s performance in the World Cup, Mary Lou met her future husband, Martin Lanigan, in Peter’s Pub in downtown Dublin. They married in 1996 in a Catholic wedding at University Church, and they had their reception in the historic Tailors’ Hall, which featured in the events leading to the 1798 rebellion. Martin works in the emergency section of a utility company. They have two children, Iseult, born in 2003, and Gearóid, named after her husband’s father, who arrived in 2006.
Mary Lou’s first involvement in politics came in the mid-1990s when she joined the Irish National Congress (INC), a campaign group which promotes the aims and ideals of Irish republicanism on a non-party basis. The INC was originally set up in 1989, under the chairmanship of leading artist Robert Ballagh, to prepare for the 75th anniversary of the 1916 Rising two years later. In the anti-republican, revisionist climate of the time, official celebrations were going to be quite modest and far different in scale from what would later be planned for the centenary in 2016.
McDonald and Finian McGrath, who was subsequently elected to the Dáil as an Independent, both served in the position of leas -chathaoirleach (vice-chair) of the organisation in the mid-90s. McDonald chaired the organisation for a year from March 2000.27 McGrath told me:
The idea was, we were trying to do a copy of the ANC [African National Congress] in South Africa, because Mandela was on the way into power at the time and we just had this idea of having a broad republican nationalist front that would include every [individual or organisation]– including Sinn Féin, including independents like myself – that had a national vision for the country.
McGrath says that they worked closely as joint vice-chairs of the INC: ‘She was a fantastic speaker, a woman of great belief. She had a great vision for our country at the time and was also very proactive in developing and supporting the early stages of the peace process, when a lot of people were hostile to it.’28 The INC newsletter of April 2000 which announced her appointment as chair by the national executive also declared the organisation’s intention to hold ‘an anti-sectarian protest’ in Dublin on 28 May.29 This was in opposition to a proposed march by the Dublin and Wicklow lodge of the Orange Order and the unveiling of a plaque at 59 Dawson Street, in the city centre, where the first meeting of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was held on 9 April 1798.
The Order sees itself as an unapologetic defender of Protestant civil and religious liberties, but its critics, with equal forthrightness, claim that its activities are damaging to community relations.There were major tensions and disturbances in Northern Ireland on an annual basis over a proposed Orange Order march through a nationalist area on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown. The INC was very involved in this issue, and McDonald herself visited the scene. The parade in Dublin was called-off and the counter-demonstrators were accused of intimidation. In a letter published in the Irish Times on 10 May, McDonald rejected this allegation and the notion that the Order had been ‘demonised’ by herself and other critics.
On 28 May, Dublin’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Mary Freehill of the Labour Party, unveiled the Dawson Street plaque. No one from the Orange Order was present but the Irish Times reported that the crowd of about 150 included a ‘bevy’ of protesters from the INC: ‘These carried placards with messages such as “Dublin says No to sectarianism”, as well as a mock Orange banner comparing the Order to the Ku Klux Klan. A spokeswoman, Ms Mary Lou McDonald, said the Congress was not opposed to the unveiling of the plaque. The protesters were there to register their “strenuous objections” to the way the Lord Mayor had engaged with the Orange Order. She accused Cllr Freehill of failing to recognise the scale of the sectarian problem in Ireland and of ‘ingratiating’ herself with an organisation “which continues to foster division and fear”.30 The Lord Mayor was quoted as saying that, ‘the Order represents a significant strand in the politics and culture of those claiming a British-Irish identity. It is part of our shared history and should be recognised as such’.
In a letter published on 27 June in the Irish Times, McDonald said one of the reasons for the INC demonstration was ‘to remind elected representatives of their responsibility to defend the right of Irish citizens to live free from sectarian harassment, as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement’. Responding in the letters page on 3 July, Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group said she was ‘delighted to learn that the INC now seems to be accepting the Agreement which it strongly opposed in 1998’. Replying, McDonald said that, ‘contrary to Ms Clancy’s assertion, the Irish National Congress did not oppose the Good Friday Agreement’. She reiterated in an interview for this book that the INC did not oppose the Agreement, although there were ‘mixed views’ about it among the membership. ‘The Articles 2 and 3 issue was very, very “angsty” for the Irish National Congress,’ she said, adding that she did not share those concerns. ‘At the time that issue of Articles 2 and 3 was huge for nationalist Ireland, I suppose most markedly for people in the South.’
Separate referendums were held on the two sides of the border in the aftermath of the successful conclusion of multi-party talks at Stormont’s Castle Buildings on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. The electorate in the Republic were asked to vote on a new version of Articles 2 and 3 which accepted that the North could not become part of a united Ireland without the consent of a majority in each jurisdiction. A front-page report in the Sunday Business Post on 15 March 1998 said the Irish Government was proposing to change Articles 2 and 3 without any meaningful quid pro quo from the British, and that ‘the Irish National
