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Michelle O’Neill’s right-hand man moves South to guide strategy for Mary Lou McDonald

Stephen McGlade (44) is an accomplished Sinn Féin backroom operative with vast experience and a talent for looking to the future

Sinn Fein adviser Stephen McGlade with party president Mary Lou McDonald, First Minister Michelle O'Neill and Ms McDonald's chief of staff Dawn Doyle. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

Freya McClements
Sat May 4 2024 - 06:00

For the last seven years, Stephen McGlade has been Michelle O’Neill’s right-hand man.

He was chief adviser and confidant to Northern Ireland’s now First Minister since she took over from Martin McGuinness as Sinn Féin’s leader in the North. In those seven years, wherever O’Neill was to be found, so was McGlade.

The moment earlier this year when she rose to address the Assembly as the first nationalist to hold the post in Northern Ireland’s history, was the high point of not just her career but of his.

McGlade has now been called South to take up the post of strategy adviser to Mary Lou McDonald.

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McGlade’s brief is to look ahead and deliver, so the party hopes, further electoral success: first in the local and European elections on June 7th and then the ultimate prize, the general election, which must be held by the spring of next year.

Working alongside her chief of staff, Dawn Doyle, he is part of the senior team focusing on election planning and strategy. Looking forward is McGlade’s bread-and-butter..

At Stormont, he has modernised and professionalised the party’s approach and has been credited with softening O’Neill’s image after she took over from Martin McGuinness [as deputy first minister]

Just go back to O’Neill’s maiden speech as First Minister – written by McGlade – and consider the language.

The emphasis was all about the future; O’Neill acknowledged different and changing identities and aspirations and, addressing unionists directly, pledged to be “inclusive and respectful” toward them.

At Stormont, he has modernised and professionalised the party’s approach and has been credited with softening O’Neill’s image after she took over from McGuinness and helping her grow into the role of deputy first minister from 2020 to early 2022.

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“If there’s one leader that’s grown in stature in the North in recent years, it is Michelle O’Neill,” says Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool.

McGlade has focused on building relationships both across party lines and beyond politics to the extent that he is often the first to know what is happening in other parties, or indeed in governments.

McGlade grew up in Black Mountain in west Belfast, on one side of a peace wall, and from his late teens became involved in grassroots community and peacebuilding work

From a republican family in west Belfast, 44-year-old McGlade is married with two young children and lives in Carrickmore, Co Tyrone.

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A maternal great-grandfather, William Gilmore, was an adjutant in the Fianna and then the Irish Volunteers in Belfast from 1916 and ended up on the pro-Treaty side of the IRA in Dublin in the Civil War. More recently, his cousin Joe Keenan was a member of the Irish Defence Forces who served on UN peacekeeping duty in Lebanon and the Golan Heights.

McGlade grew up in Black Mountain in west Belfast, on one side of a peace wall, and from his late teens became involved in grassroots community and peacebuilding work under activists and trade unionists Terry Enright and May Blood, individuals who remain his role models.

He has a degree in international relations from Queen’s University Belfast and worked for the Belfast Education and Library Board before taking a senior job with Sinn Féin almost 20 years ago.

Eoin Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD and the party’s spokesman on housing, is believed to have been responsible for recruiting McGlade into Sinn Féin Youth in 1997. McGlade became involved in community and political activism and joined the party staff in 2007 as special adviser to the then regional development minister, Conor Murphy.

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He has worked in Leinster House before. From 2011 to 2017 he headed the party’s political operation there under then-leader Gerry Adams, and while working with O’Neill was – along with Dawn Doyle – a key point of North/South contact.

McGlade has been part of the Sinn Féin negotiating team since 2017, advised the party leadership on Brexit and was involved in the New Decade, New Approach deal that led to the restoration of Stormont in 2020.

As special adviser to O’Neill during her tenure as deputy first minister, he managed relationships with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) side of the joint office as well as with the three other Executive parties and liaised with the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the governments in London, Dublin and Brussels.

There is no denying McGlade’s experience.

“It makes sense,” says Tonge. “Why wouldn’t Sinn Féin utilise it?”

For Tonge, it demonstrates the party’s priorities are “very much focused on the election down South” and preparing for what the party hopes will be a spell in government for Sinn Féin. The pool of experience built up in the North, where it has been in government since 2007, means it has the capacity to draft in reinforcements.

“Even the party’s biggest critics would not deny that there’s a talented team that has been assembled around Michelle O’Neill,” says Tonge. “They have got some good ideas and you’ve seen the way they’ve helped her grow in stature in the job.”

The skills learned in the North “are transferable”, because on both sides of the border Sinn Féin will have to work with other parties, he says.

“Whilst the coalitions are informal in the South, the political realities are the same... so why wouldn’t you utilise the knowledge that lies up North?

“He’s got bags of experience, unquestionable loyalty to the party, never blotted his copybook at any stage,” Tonge says of McGlade. “It’s a sign of Sinn Féin’s strength that they can do such things.”

Freya McClements

Freya McClements

Freya McClements is Northern Editor of The Irish Times

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