Miriam Lord: Book launch sees Seán O’Rourke untypically forthcoming in remarks about Mary Lou and SF

‘Tis the season to be bringing out political books, and Stephen Collins, our august columnist and former Irish Times political editor, managed to rope in Taoiseach Micheál Martin to break the publisher’s plonk over his latest launch — Ireland’s Call: Navigating Brexit.

No. No. Don’t look away.

“It’s actually a good old read. Like reliving Brexit without the turgid stuff and with loads of gossipy bits about the main personalities” was an early verdict from the individual who stole our copy on the night and has promised to return it. Which would be a first.

The launch was in the elegant Merrion Square headquarters of the National University of Ireland, and NUI chancellor Maurice Manning — a former FG TD and senator — was MC for the occasion. He pointed out that Micheál Martin and Stephen Collins are NUI graduates who both studied history and are published authors.

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For those trying to compile an early Christmas gift list for a loved one, Micheál’s opus, published by Collins Press (not Stephen) in 2009, is called Freedom to Choose: Cork and Party Politics in Ireland 1918-1932.

Maurice mentioned that he supervised Stephen’s Master’s degree, which was on the significance of the land annuities issue in the 1932 election. Micheál piped up that it was indeed a very important election, an observation not lost on the many political anoraks present — who were definitely not the anorak-wearing type. They explained that Fianna Fáil first came to power in 1932.

Although a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach did the honours and former Labour leader Ruairí Quinn also attended, the general hue in the room was Blue. Guests included former FG leader and taoiseach John Bruton and his wife Finola, former foreign affairs minister Charlie Flanagan, Minister of State Patrick O’Donovan and Ministers Heather Humphreys and Paschal Donohoe. Paschal nipped in and out between the Dáil vote on the concrete blocks and the FG parliamentary party meeting. The previous day, Minister for Finance Donohoe moved to kill off gathering speculation that he was going after Klaus Regling’s job as head of the EU’s bailout fund, the ESM.

But this hasn’t stopped the rumours in his own party that Paschal is still set on a big job in Europe.

[ Wondering what the hell the Brexit negotiations were all about? Bobby McDonagh on Ireland’s Call: Navigating Brexit  ]

Since last week’s budget he has been on a whistle-stop tour of the country, attending public meetings organised by local reps with businesspeople and community groups. He told the parliamentary party that he is very satisfied at how well the budget has been received on the ground. “It’s like he’s on a lap of honour now,” said a colleague afterwards. “Leo won’t leave him out in the reshuffle, but we’re still convinced he won’t be sticking around.”

The German, French, Dutch and Japanese ambassadors were at the launch (diplomats love the Brexit thing), while the UK’s ambassador to Ireland, Paul Johnston, had to cancel at the last minute as he had Covid. He could do worse than give his new boss, Liz Truss, a copy of Ireland’s Call.

Supreme Court survivor Judge Séamus Woulfe is clearly over his Golfgate trauma, which at its height included a dressing-down from then chief justice Frank Clarke. He appeared in good form and later held court with some legal chums in Smyths of Haddington Road, to whence the remnants of the Merrion Square launch also repaired.

Also at the launch was Dan Flinter, chairman of The Irish Times, along with a large number of Stephen’s IT colleagues doing our, sorry, their best not to get drunk until Dan left the building.

Broadcaster Sean O’Rourke arrived from Doheny and Nesbitt’s pub where he had just launched Shane Ross’s book on Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald. Also present were journalists Joe Joyce and Sam Smyth, Sunday Independent editor Alan English, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) newsreader Eileen Dunne, former Labour senator Lorraine Higgins and the author’s brother, journalist and man-about-town Liam Collins.

Ireland’s Call: Navigating Brexit is published by Red Stripe Press and costs €19.99 (hardback).

Shane tackles the conundrum of Mary Lou

Doheny and Nesbitt’s watering hole on Baggot Street was a lovely venue for the launch of Shane Ross’s new book Mary Lou McDonald: A Republican Riddle, but it could have happened in the more salubrious confines of Leinster House if the powers-that-be hadn’t got cold feet and rescinded the original invite.

Invitations were very much on the author’s mind. Ross was most put out by the fact that nobody from Sinn Féin put in an appearance on the night.

“A most unlikely proposition,” said journalist and broadcaster Sean O’Rourke, who did the honours at Wednesday’s launch. He wasn’t referring to the no-shows, but the very idea that someone like Shane Ross, aka Winston Churchtown, would write a book about the leader of Sinn Féin.

However, Ross explained to him that he got on very well with Mary Lou during their time on the Public Accounts Committee.

“Having been through this book,” said Sean, “if this is what a friend produces, she sure as hell wouldn’t want to read what an enemy would write. Which is not to suggest that it’s unfair. It is, however, a relentless work of scrutiny.”

For his part, the former minister for transport’s fanciful hope that the subject of his unauthorised biography might grace his launch party was more than balanced by everyone else’s view that it would have been a big surprise had she turned up.

“I was a bit disappointed because I like her,” Ross told us on Friday after Mary Lou had spurned his invite. Not only that, but Pearse Doherty told him he would attend his book launch and he gave it a wide berth too. The former leader of the Independent Alliance, who has been one of Sinn Féin’s fiercest critics over the years, agreed the book was critical of Mary Lou but “not intended to torpedo what she’s at. It’s not a hatchet job.”

On the plus side, Violet-Anne Wynne, the TD for Clare who was elected for Sinn Féin but has since become an Independent, said she would attend. But even she didn’t make it in the end. She later texted her apologies and explained she couldn’t get her pram up the narrow stairs to the function room.

Now that he isn’t tied to the Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) mothership, Sean O’Rourke was untypically forthcoming in his remarks about Mary Lou and Sinn Féin. He talked about the chapter where Ross writes about the party leader’s home — “the mansion in Cabra”.

“I suspect that if Mary Lou and Sinn Féin don’t provide convincing answers to the questions this book asks about how that house has been funded, my media colleagues won’t be prepared to accept brush-offs,” he said. She and her supporters “may well see passages of this book as encroaching on her private business, but unfortunately that’s the way political life has become. If it’s not done sooner she will find herself repeatedly challenged to explain the funding of that house.”

He was “perplexed” at how the party initially seemed willing to co-operate with the author and his researchers before “a pattern emerged... requests for co-operation, conversations and insights met positive responses initially, but soon turning to evasion and non-co-operation. Total exclusion.”

He added it wasn’t only Ross “who’s got this treatment”, citing Sunday Times journalist Aoife Moore, who was at the launch, “from a well known family in Derry”, who has been “similarly cold-shouldered”. Sinn Féin has “made it clear that she will get no co-operation in the writing of her book” on the modern Sinn Féin.

“This lack of openness, this omertà, is deeply disconcerting,” said O’Rourke. “What does it tell us about what we might expect from Sinn Féin in government? How would the party set about controlling its message and in its appointments to sensitive positions in the governance of broadcasting, for example?”

Such caution during the Troubles may have been understandable, but is there any need today “for such control freakery?”

On the other hand, he mused, “perhaps Sinn Féin in government will turn out to be models of transparency”.

On a lighter note, he told guests that his father was born in the house in Enniskerry which was later owned by Shane Ross, and described how he prevailed upon the politician back in 2013 to allow a gathering of the extended O’Rourke family to visit the old homeplace while they were in the village to do up the family grave in nearby Curtlestown.

Over 40 of them arrived at Glenbrook House and Shane and his wife Ruth Buchanan looked after them splendidly, even if they drank every drop of prosecco in the house and all of Ruth’s fabled elderflower wine.

Many years later, when he was a government minister and in hot water over the issuing of a sports grant to a private school in south Co Dublin, his advisers told him he had to go out and talk to the media. “But don’t go near Sean O’Rourke. He’ll murder you!”

The minister, however, decided to brave the famously tough interviewer as he felt he owed him for the time he visited Glenmore House.

“He absolutely crucified me. Showed no quarter left me for dead,” recalled Ross.

“It was the mark of the great journalist.”

Mary Lou McDonald: A Republican Riddle is published by Atlantic Press and the paperback cost €16.99.

Senator makes the switch to Gaeilge

There was a minor kerfuffle in the Seanad chamber on Wednesday morning as the Minister for Justice prepared to answer a question from Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee on the new Children’s Court complex.

The Cathaoirleach watched from on high and Helen McEntee stood back while Seanad staff and ushers bustled around the desk where the Minister was supposed to be sitting, looking around it and under it and checking all the little nooks and crannies. Both McEntee and Clifford-Lee looked remarkably composed, because it looked for all the world like the officials were searching for a mouse.

But no. They were looking for a set of headphones and a port to plug them into.

The matter was quickly sorted and Lorraine commenced her question, speaking in Irish while the Minister listened to a simultaneous translation. This was not a one-off occasion for the Fianna Fáil Senator, who tells us she will be making all her contributions in the Upper House as Gaeilge from now on.

“Why not?” she asks. “We have a really good translation service here and we have the choice.”

There is a reason why Lorraine, a fluent Irish speaker who has a BComm with Irish from UCD and a law degree, has suddenly decided to deliver all her speeches in Irish. During lockdown she embarked on a part-time MA course in Scríobh & Cumarsáid na Gaeilge (Irish language writing and communication) and, after two years, Lorraine has just passed with flying colours.

On Wednesday she also took over from Dara Calleary (now Minister of State for Enterprise) as vice-chair of the Oireachtas Committee on the Irish Language, Gaeltacht and the Irish-speaking Community. She was proposed by Aindrias Moynihan (FF) and seconded by the committee chairman, Aengus Ó Snodaigh (SF).

Lorraine found her return to study a “fantastic experience” but admitted “it was a hard slog at stages” as she juggled work with home school and Covid.

She isn’t expecting other Senators to reply to her in Irish but points out that it is the norm in many parliaments to to have speakers using different languages.

“It happens in Canada and the European Parliament, for example, and everyone works with it.”

The North Dublin-based Senator doesn’t know how her decision will pan out in the long run. “But I want to give it a try. I’m willing to persevere and, hopefully, maybe other politicians will be inspired to follow.”

Meanwhile, Helen McEntee was guest speaker at a fundraising lunch on Thursday organised by her colleague, Senator Emer Currie, for the Dublin Mid West constituency. Over 100 guests attended the bash held in Dublin Zoo’s Meerkat Restaurant which promised a “meet-and-greet, 2-course lunch and a Q&A with Minister for Justice, TD and mum Helen McEntee”. Tickets cost €100 and the event was sold out.