In the three weeks since Michelle O’Neill last appeared in the front of Stormont’s Executive Office scrutiny committee the hole Sinn Féin finds itself in has deepened significantly. On Wednesday’s evidence, the party is content to keep digging rather than to hold its hands up.
The first minister has had to correct the Assembly record twice since her last appearance, having initially provided answers that were subsequently shown to be inaccurate.
Sinn Féin’s failing, and the reason this series of controversies continues to be the focus of political and media attention, has been a lack of transparency and clarity.
The party’s tactics of obfuscation and deflection, along with senior party representatives’ insistence that they failed to see a suspected sex offender who they knew personally standing a matter feet away, have simply prompted more questions.
On October 2, the first minister faced a limited number of questions from committee members around her party’s handling of the Michael McMonagle affair.
The former Sinn Féin press officer and self-confessed paedophile received employment references from two former colleagues to secure a job with the British Heart Foundation while under police investigation.
Committee chair Paula Bradshaw was at the time accused of closing down questions, a claim she countered by highlighting constraints in the committee’s remit, so her role too would be under scrutiny, alongside the Sinn Féin deputy leader.
In the three weeks since the first minister last appeared there’s been more revelations around McMonagle, while it also emerged that Niall Ó Donnghaile, a former Belfast lord mayor and the party’s leader in the Seanad, was suspended from Sinn Féin in September last year for sending inappropriate texts to a 16-year-old.
When his resignation from the Seanad was announced more than three months later, he received a glowing tribute from party leader Mary Lou McDonald.
Sinn Féin has sought to draw a line under these and other related governance issues a number of times, but has been let down by its own inconsistencies.
Wednesday’s Executive Office committee appearance offered Michelle O’Neill the opportunity to finally put the record straight by being open and frank about her party’s safeguarding shortcomings.
Some may argue that the committee isn’t the place to conduct such scrutiny but the first minister’s media shyness means it’s all that’s on offer.
It was apparent from the outset, however, that despite Ms O’Neill’s assurances that she was being “open and transparent”, she was refusing to answer any MLA’s questions that she regarded as “party politicking” – an absurd assertion to make in a legislature staffed by elected politicians.
The Sinn Féin deputy leader was free to volunteer information beyond the committee’s specific remit and provide the “fulsome” response she spoke of in the Assembly previously but she instead chose to cite her own legal advice and rebuff questions with non answers.
At one point she asked the chair: “Can I ask you, are you confident that you’re following your own legal advice?”
An often visibly flustered Ms Bradshaw, attempting to keep a tight rein on proceedings, at times seemed to indulge the first minister’s claim that MLAs were going off piste.
Much of what committee members said was general and open-ended, while some of it could be characterised as grandstanding. Only occasionally was the questioning pointed, suggesting either a competency deficit or a reluctance to go in too hard.
When it came to one of the few questions that would have perhaps shed some light on why senior Sinn Féin representatives seemingly ignored or did not notice McMonagle at Parliament Buildings in February last year, and why they did not alert his new employers about a police investigation, Ms O’Neill declined to answer.
Over her shoulder, John Loughran, the special adviser who was pictured looking straight at McMonagle at the Stormont event, occasionally scribbled notes.
DUP MLA Brian Kingston asked whether the first minister had asked her spad and Junior Minister Aisling Reilly if they saw the suspected paedophile in Stormont’s Great Hall but again the Sinn Féin deputy leader deflected by questioning the validity of what was being asked.
Few of those involved emerged from the committee session with their credibility intact. It was an ill-tempered 45 minutes that at times descended into a puerile slagging match.
We learned nothing new, while merely confirming the notion that, on the whole, our political class isn’t fit for purpose.
