With an election looming in the south every issue seemingly assumes disproportionate significance. Yet that doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the situation facing Sinn Féin, on both sides of the border.
For more than a fortnight, the party’s safeguarding record and its internal processes have been in the spotlight, its credibility diminishing by the day. Efforts to close down coverage have backfired, as at every turn a new revelation prompts a fresh line of inquiry from journalists and political opponents alike.
Sinn Féin’s under-pressure Stormont team must’ve breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week as their Dublin counterparts felt some of the heat that’s been focused on Michelle O’Neill since the controversy around former press officer and self-confessed paedophile Michael McMonagle broke at the end of last month.
There’d been an assumption, largely based on wishful thinking, that to banish the two press officers who unilaterally wrote McMonagle job references would kill the story. However, there were too many holes in the narrative to keep it contained.
The entirely separate controversy involving Laois TD Brian Stanley has exposed shortcomings in the party’s internal procedures but like the McMonagle case, the strategy of deflection and obfuscation is what is causing Sinn Féin greatest harm.
The party’s culture of secrecy and the ‘groupthink’ identified by former Sinn Féin TD Peadar Tóibín is an asset when things are going well but if the centralised leadership can’t get a clear handle on a developing scandal it results in elected representatives tying themselves in knots.
The self-outing in this newspaper of former Belfast lord mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile as the party representative behind inappropriate texts sent to a teenager provided yet another twist in an unedifying series of episodes that are almost unprecedented in their persistence. The former senator was praised by Mary Lou McDonald when he resigned last year, citing health reasons.
Ms McDonald was poised to reveal his identity in the Dáil but the party’s former leader in Seanad decided to pre-empt any effort to make him the sacrificial lamb. In the Dublin TD’s subsequent address, she consistently struggled to pronounce Ó Donnghaile’s surname correctly and failed to explain convincingly why it took a year for the truth to come out.
Sinn Féin is far from out of the woods, as there remain countless unanswered questions around McMonagle, Brian Stanley and Niall Ó Donnghaile.
At Stormont there seems to be a reluctance among Sinn Féin’s executive partners to go for the jugular and destabilise the institutions. In the south, however, the party was already hemorrhaging support ahead of these scandals and it can only hope Simon Harris is nervous about a pre-Christmas election.
The series of recent revelations suggests no matter how sincere Sinn Féin is in its desire to come clean and reclaim some credibility, the public will be eternally sceptical.
