INTERVIEW:Having advised two attorneys general and headed communications for the PSNI and, now, the Garda Síochána, Sinéad McSweeney is comfortable in the company of powerful men, writes Susan McKay
SINÉAD McSWEENEY was at Heathrow, on her way to Downing Street, when her mobile rang. It was the autumn of 2004. She was only a couple of months into her new job as director of communications for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and she was about to attend the first meeting between Hugh Orde, its chief constable, and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin president, with Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, in the chair.
The highly excited Dublin journalist on the phone began to speak to her in Irish, as if this were a code the two of them could share, Southerners in a strange land. "I was struggling with my school Irish," she says. "It was so ridiculous. The security services already knew about the meeting - and, anyway, they spoke better Irish than me."
Back in Dublin now, and a couple of months into her new job as head of communications for the Garda Síochána, McSweeney is fascinated by the cultural fault lines that run through the way British, Irish and Northern Irish people understand each other. "When you cross the Border you really are in a different place," she says. "I don't want to say another country."
She admits to a sense of awe about that London meeting. "Here was I, up from Cork and in this big room in Downing Street where the British cabinet holds its meetings," says McSweeney. But this woman is comfortable in the company of powerful men. The first time she met the then taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, she didn't just ask him for a job, she supplied the job description.
From a modest home in Midleton, she studied law at University College Cork and at King's Inns. She was called to the Bar in 1993. With debts from college to pay off she took a job as a parliamentary transcriber at Leinster House. After three years she was ready for a challenge. "I met Bertie at a function, and I told him I was from a Fianna Fáil household and that if he wanted someone to prepare people for parliamentary performance I'd be interested. I'd got a feel for the cut and thrust by then."
Ahern obliged, and McSweeney joined the Fianna Fáil election campaign team of 1997. "It was fun," she says. Law is a great training, she reckons. "You don't get hung up on acquiring and holding on to knowledge," she says. "You acquire it for when you need it. You learn the power of analysis. You learn to cut things down. People tend to engage in lots of superfluous stuff. They want to speak for 30 minutes - you lose people's attention after five."
She met the candidate for Dublin South East, Noel Whelan. "We clicked at a very early point," she says. "We both knew we were going to stick it out together. But believe me, candidates are insane." They married in 2000. Whelan is a barrister and an Irish Timescolumnist.
McSweeney was chosen to act as adviser to the attorney general, a new and sensitive position, and when David Byrne left to become Ireland's EU commissioner Michael McDowell took over. She moved with him to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform in 2002.
"He's amazing to work for," she says. "He's an intellectual powerhouse. He maintained a huge workload, but he never forgot you had a home life. He is great fun, a very interesting person to have around socially. When he had the equality brief we went to the most unlikely venues, and he had this great ability to connect with people. The arrogance that is perceived just isn't there at all," she says.
"I loved Justice. I loved the Garda stuff, and I was getting increasingly interested in media matters. I remember watching some TV drama. They had a female head of communications, and I said I'd love to do that," she says. "I got back from a work trip in 2004, and Noel had pinned the ad for the PSNI job to the fridge door."
She didn't know the North. "I'd been twice to Hillsborough for meetings," she says. The interview was daunting. "The head of media from the Met was there and the chief himself," she says. "I had an exchange of views with the chief - he asked me about a what-if scenario, and I said I didn't agree with the scenario," she says. "The man from the Met said he'd been going to ask me what I'd do if I disagreed with the chief. 'We know the answer to that, now,' he said." She laughs. "I got the land of my life when I got the call to say I had the job. The hardest thing was to tell Michael McDowell I was leaving."
Working 150km from home was hard, too, but she and Whelan bought a house in Belfast, and he'd come up at weekends. "I was farther away from Noel and Cork and Mum," she says. "But the road slowly improved as the three years passed." Her house had a view over Belfast Lough. "There are elements of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland in Belfast: a nice pace, local bakeries and butchers, people who exchange a friendly word," she says.
Still. The only friends she made were at work. "For all the friendliness there's an edge to interactions in the North. There's also an aggression that is unnecessary in civilised situations."
She was a Catholic from the Republic and she'd been working for the Irish government: the DUP criticised her appointment as "political". She recalls an early meeting with an SDLP delegation. "There was all this shouting and roaring, completely unnecessary," she says. "When they left I was in shock. Sometimes, even with staff, there was a defensiveness, a readiness to jump down your throat."
The police did more to try to understand Sinn Féin and the fears of its people than vice versa, she says. "Some of the people most open to change within policing were the ones who'd been the most hurt. Sinn Féin hasn't given them credit for what they've done." She was appalled by the way many journalists reported on the burning issue of police informants. "There was a sense that all bets were off. Long-established rules were laid aside," she says.
Hugh Orde was a good boss. "He has a very empowering style of leadership," she says. "He's a highly competent police officer who understands the subtleties and does well in the media." It was McSweeney who had to inform him that a British tabloid was about to break the story that he was having an affair and that his lover had given birth to his child. "I don't want to go there," she says. "It was difficult for everyone. The vast majority of journalists behaved responsibly."
She recalls getting tetchy with a veteran reporter, Deric Henderson, on one occasion when he kept asking her about a relatively minor security incident. "I said to him: 'Look, it's just a pipe bomb,' " she says. "He said: 'Just a pipe bomb? Oh, Sinéad, you've been here too long!' "
When the job with the Garda came up she didn't hesitate. "It was time to come home," she says. "We'd anticipated the difficulties, but you can only do that for so long and maintain a healthy marriage."
McSweeney has her work cut out for her in Dublin, with a press office that routinely fails to respond to media queries other than to acknowledge that they have been received. "I appreciate that people think we have a black hole," she says. "There is perhaps not a recognition that journalists have deadlines. We do need to be slightly more customer focused. But we are not well resourced - the press office is only two or three people. I genuinely see them doing their best. And there's no excuse for journalists bawling a 24-year-old clerical officer out."
At 37 she's pregnant with her first child and glowing with health and happiness. "I'd ordered some clothes online, and I arrived into work one day and there, sitting on my intray, was this large parcel, all blue and white balloons and 'For you and your baby'," she says. "I said to my staff: 'Wasn't it lucky I already told yiz?' Some of the websites say they'll be discreet, as if you were getting porn."
She plays piano and guitar. Her garden is full of flowers, tended by Whelan, and her home in Ranelagh is full of books and photographs she has taken. She's glad to be back. "I'd forgotten what it's like to walk down the street and meet people you know." She does tough jobs but doesn't get stressed, she says. "I have a simple philosophy. I try not to get worked up about things I can do nothing about. If I'm in a traffic jam I put on a CD or ring my mum. But, then again, people who know me might say: 'She's not like that at all.' "