Mary Lou McDonald did not want to be there.
The atmosphere was tense as deputies assembled for Leaders’ Questions.
The Sinn Féin benches were packed and waiting, radiating nervous energy. In an otherwise sparsely populated Dáil chamber, it was an impressive show of strength.
Government and Opposition TDs talked quietly, as if whispering in church.
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The Taoiseach and most of his front bench took their places.
The Sinn Féin leader, dressed in black from head to toe, timed her arrival to the very last minute. The low hum of conversation stopped completely the instant she appeared.
Mary Lou got down to business. The issue she addressed was very serious – the large numbers of children with disabilities on long waiting lists for an assessment of their needs.
The Taoiseach responded. She followed up. He responded.
Was anyone listening?
It didn’t feel like it. They could have been talking about the weather.
There was a brittle edge to the proceedings; a sense of people holding their breath, waiting for the drama to come. Minds were very much elsewhere.
Observers scanned the ranks for the two runaways. No sign of Brian Stanley and no sign of Patricia Ryan. No surprise.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik was the next. She raised the “ongoing brutal bombardment by Israel of Gaza and Lebanon”.
As Ivana was getting to her feet, Mary Lou exchanged hurried whispers with Pearse Doherty, the party’s deputy leader in the Dáil, and with Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, the party whip, and then belted for the doors, moving so fast she collided with Mattie McGrath as he was leaving his seat.
She would be in again for Statements on Child Protection, a session the Government shoehorned into the schedule amid questions over how Sinn Féin handled the cases of a party press officer under investigation for child sex abuse and two other members of the press office – one a veteran republican – who wrote job references for him after he left Sinn Féin.
That was before Kildare TD Patricia Ryan jumped ship, alleging the party didn’t listen to its members, censored her social media posts and wanted to vet questions to the leadership from the rank and file.
And all before the bizarre but gripping Brian Stanley story emerged at the weekend. It’s still as clear as mud, with the TD for Laois and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) resigning because of a “seriously flawed” in-house inquiry carried out after a party member lodged a complaint against him.
He then lodged a countercomplaint.
Stanley clearly believes he is the victim of an attempt by the head honchos to stop him running for re-election.
The exact nature of these complaints is not known but both Sinn Féin and Brian Stanley have been lawyered up for months now and throughout this time Mary Lou, the leader of the party, has remained in the dark about the nature of the complaint and most other aspects of this baffling saga.
This is all thanks to Sinn Féin’s peerless HR procedures, which she and various floundering spokespeople have been lauding as a model which other parties should follow.
Which had Ivana Bacik wondering in the Dáil on Tuesday why, if the way they handle these situations is so good, is Mary Lou now announcing at every opportunity that she has “initiated a complete overhaul” of these same governance procedures.
“An abundance of caution” is why and the party leader and her troops can’t say this enough.
An abundance of caution or an abundance of caught-out?
Because hot on the heels of the errant press officers and the Brian Stanley fiasco, when the party is flailing about trying to firefight the inconsistencies and incredible explanations in its timeline of corporate ignorance, comes another doozy.
Bad enough for Mary Lou having to brazen out the mangled timelines and misremembering in the first two. On Tuesday, the party finally gave up on trying to wrangle the bucking bronco of the unnamed party member turfed out over sending inappropriate messages to young men last year.
It must have been humiliating for her to have to come into the chamber and admit that this individual is Sinn Féin’s former leader in the Seanad who was still acting in that capacity months after the party suspended him.
Her warm tribute to Niall Ó Donnghaile after his resignation in December when the Upper House was in recess was faithfully reported in the media.
The Sinn Féin president read through her script as the statements on child protection began, keeping her head down for the most part. Four Coalition speakers went first – two Ministers and two backbenchers.
Had Mary Lou looked straight across the floor and up to the public gallery directly, she would have seen former Fine Gael MEP and minister Frances Fitzgerald, and Máiría Cahill, who was raped as a young girl by a leading IRA member and then forced to confront her abuser in a “kangaroo court” of fellow republicans.
With the Sinn Féin benches packed again, their leader prepared for the most critical moment in her political career. Her TDs sat, stony faced, as the Government speakers dredged up sordid highlights from a secretive past, accusing the party of playing with its own version of law and order instead of honouring due process.
They picked at the gaping holes in the shape-shifting narrative presented by its leader.
Mary Lou McDonald began by reaffirming her party’s overriding commitment to child protection “as a leader of a party and as a mother who has raised two children”.
In an unwavering voice, she continued to plunder the thesaurus in her efforts to drive home how much she is repulsed by the actions of the “despicable” Michael McMonagle, who admitted child abuse charges.
There followed a litany of how things went wrong and how it wasn’t Sinn Féin’s fault. Just an unfortunate series of oversight events.
And by the way, added the party leader, the “other two” resignations had nothing to do with child protection matters.
So that’s something.
At the end of her contribution, the Sinn Féin leader chose to close with a blistering attack on her Government critics.
“Ladies and gentlemen, your cynicism is matched only by your hypocrisy,” she said in withering tones, accusing the Coalition of exploiting her party’s only “human” difficulties for electoral gain.
It was an undignified and touchily defensive end, and it undid much of what the holier-than-thou, more-sinned-against-than sinning picture she had just worked so hard to construct.
When she finished, Mary Lou consulted one of her phones and put it in a folder. Then she consulted her other phone before tucking it away too.
And before Ivana had even finished her opening lines, she was up and out of the chamber. Gone.
Probably didn’t want to hear what Ivana was going to say. Or Holly Cairns.
Didn’t want to be there.
The unvarnished truth.
Her lines don’t stack up.
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