A republican riddle: Mary Lou McDonald, the woman who would be taoiseach

Mary Lou McDonald: A Republican Riddle

Author: Shane Ross

ISBN-13: 978-1838955892

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Guideline Price: £16.99

Shane Ross — a “Prod”, as he describes himself, educated at Rugby public school — had his work cut out to complete his lively, punchy biography of Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin’s president. Ross says that he likes and admires the Dublin TD but that, regardless, after she “consulted” a few “(unnamed) people” she would not co-operate with the book and neither would central party and IRA figures.

Undaunted, Ross even tried to butter up Gerry Adams, sending him a congratulatory text ahead of his 73rd birthday and requesting a meeting. The Rosses were having lunch when the reply came, “Nope Shane. Grma xo ga.”

Ross was baffled, but his daughter Rebecca decoded: “go raibh maith agat” with a “hug and a kiss” from Adams. It took his wife, Ruth Buchanan, to frame the response: “Tfr xoxo sr” — tá fáilte romhat with a plurality of hugs and kisses.

Ross concedes the hugs and kisses were “probably a bit over the top”.

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But if he couldn’t have access to the inner republican and family circles, Ross doggedly and with success canvassed the extended republican and family circles, and many others, to tell the story of 53-year-old McDonald more or less from the cradle to her Sinn Féin ascendancy.

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In terms of new material, Ross scores most success in dealing with her important formative years. Paddy McDonald, her father who separated from her mother Joan when Mary Lou was 10, is depicted as a “colourful” character with a tendency to land himself in various scrapes that must have caused embarrassment. A “loyal and loud Fianna Fáil supporter” during the general election of 1973, he refused to move an illegally parked campaign truck. That resulted in the “truck, the posters and Paddy” all ending up locked in a Dublin corporation compound. A picture of Paddy and truck in the compound made the front page of the Irish Independent under the heading “The van behind the wire”.

The book challenges the frequent depiction of Mary Lou McDonald as enjoying a cosy bourgeois early life

Paddy was unfortunate, too. He had begun a successful contracting company but his ability to continue managing his business suffered when as a passenger he was badly injured in a two-vehicle collision. He was doubly unfortunate in that an unscrupulous solicitor effectively cost him, and his family, £50,000 due in compensation.

The book also challenges the frequent depiction of McDonald as enjoying a cosy bourgeois early life. They lived in a beautiful house on Orwell Road in south Dublin, beside the Russian embassy — Paddy had a scrape with them, too — but it was in a rented flat in the house. Life must have been a struggle. It says a lot for the strength of McDonald’s mother, who, despite these hardships, raised four children and managed to send two of them, including Mary Lou, to private school.

And it was there, at Notre Dame des Missions school in Rathgar, that the future politician was created. She excelled at debate and oratory, sharp to make her point and quick on the retort as well, skills that continue to serve her well.

The only significantly new controversial element of the book is Ross querying how McDonald and her self-effacing husband, Martin Lanigan — both on “modest” salaries, says the author — could afford to buy and convert a small bungalow into a “mansion” on New Cabra Road, in the north of the city.

Much of the rest of the story of McDonald is well-known but Ross tells it crisply, bringing it all together and lacing the plot line of her career with interesting anecdotes and occasionally his own acerbic analysis.

He notes how McDonald said the hunger strikes spurred her interest in republicanism, but then sceptically recounts that through school and Trinity College she illustrated no known political interests. It was only after university that the political awakening came. Family stories of an anti-Treaty grand-uncle executed in the Civil War also may have contributed to that awakening.

Shane Ross, who writes that McDonald joined Sinn Féin ‘with her eyes wide open’, is unsparing

Her first port of call was Fianna Fáil. Ross seeks to unriddle how and why she quit the Soldiers of Destiny. As she was “about to bolt”, Brian Lenihan jnr pleaded with her, “Mary Louise, for God’s sake, don’t leave us and join that crowd of hoodlums in Sinn Féin,” which earned the reply, “Brian, Fianna Fáil are not republican enough for me.”

Adams placed a lot of faith in McDonald. In return for this fast-tracking, she had to place a lot of faith in Adams. Ross, who writes that McDonald joined Sinn Féin “with her eyes wide open”, is unsparing. “Mary Lou’s determination to ingratiate herself with the hard men in the North was constantly landing her in deep political water. She had carried former IRA chief Joe Cahill’s coffin; she had defended Gerry Adams’s behaviour over his paedophile brother, Liam; she had positioned herself in Gerry’s corner in the case of the violation of Máiría Cahill; she had supported and swallowed his story in the Jean McConville killing. It was a pattern ... She invariably backed Gerry Adams’s fairy tales.”

There must have been times, too, that Adams and the late Martin McGuinness, also a supporter, questioned their confidence in McDonald. She began well, winning a seat in Europe in 2004, but when she contested Dublin Central in the 2007 general election, her party colleague Nicky Kehoe standing aside — another pattern in her SF career — she fared poorly. And when she sought to regain her place in Europe in 2009, she lost that, too.

But the tide turned, and gradually she established herself as the likeliest party leader in waiting, her nice Dublin 6 profile making it easier for middle-class voters to turn to Sinn Féin. She took Dublin Central in 2011, and generally the trajectory has been upwards thereafter. When Adams stood down, a move necessary to allow continued growth in the South, and when Pearse O’Doherty – who was popular with grassroot Sinn Féiners and who would have been a strong contender – moved aside, everything was in place for McDonald’s investiture.

So, as far as Adams, McDonald, Sinn Féin and the “hard men” are concerned, Ross’s book concludes happily, with Sinn Féin the top party in the North and in with a strong shout of being the lead government party after the next general election in the South, and Mary Lou McDonald very much a prospective first woman taoiseach — and probably more biographies to come.