Getting to know the neighbours – Ireland: the latest leaders

Lila Haines

Wales has had its share of ‘change the leader’ drama lately, what with Welsh Labour racking up three so far this year, but on the island of Ireland five parties have switched leaders since March 2024 – Fine Gael, the Green Party, the DUP, the UUP and the SDLP.

I had intended to look at the impact of these refreshers – Fine Gael’s new leader, Taoiseach Simon Harris TD, is currently topping opinion polls in the republic, for example, mainly at the expense of Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald – and to consider whether or not the emergence of new party leaders north and south might be pointing to a significant political reset in either jurisdiction.

However, controversy about how Sinn Féin handled the employment of a self-confessed sex offender has dominated the news agenda for the last week or so, raising truly serious questions for that party regarding its approach to the fundamental matter of child protection.

And perhaps for other parties too – who knows yet? (Note that the DUP changed leader after Jeffrey Donaldson MP was charged with historic sex offences.)

Sinn Féin and the sex offender

Basically, the current controversy involves three ex-members of Sinn Féin staff. Two senior SF employees, both press officers, provided references for another, sacked SF press officer, Michael McMonagle, who has admitted a series of sex offences, including attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity. Those references from his ex-colleagues enabled McMonagle to get a new job with the British Heart Foundation (BHF).

When the story broke, leading SF politicians gave contradictory and shifting accounts of the party’s handling of the McMonagle affair, with SF Deputy Leader Michelle O’Neill initially denying knowledge despite evidence that she and McMonagle were in close proximity at a fairly recent event.

The BHF, noting the damage done to their reputation, provided a timeline of actions it had taken in relation to their employment of McMonagle, the key point being that they contacted Sinn Féin about him in August 2023.

On Monday 7 Oct Sinn Féin’s NI leader apologised for damage caused to the BHF’s reputation while the NI Assembly confirmed that McMonagle had been employed by Ms O’Neill and three other Sinn Féin MLAs and paid from the public purse via Assembly allowances.

Wider view

Mick Fealty, a veteran political commentator and founder of the Slugger O’Toole news and opinion portal, had a more far-reaching take on the saga than many.

Organisation, he said, was ‘the hallmark of Sinn Féin’s electoral success as they moved from a twin track armed/democratic struggle to a latter day commitment to electoral means [of] taking power north and south’.

It was ‘the very centralised nature of such tenacious organisation and forceful control that saw them displace the SDLP as the lead party of nationalism in Northern Ireland’, Fealty suggested.

Things have ‘gotten looser’, he added, but still ‘nothing moves in Sinn Féin without its leadership being involved in key decisions that affect the party’.

If that is the case, one might be forgiven for wondering where the safety of children from sexual predators comes on the party’s list of key priorities.

Sinn Féin’s reputation may have taken a hit over this issue but perhaps not enough to shift the political parameters significantly in Northern Ireland, unless it helps persuade nationalist voters to return in significant numbers to the SDLP under its new leader, Claire Hanna MP.

It is likely to exacerbate their woes in the republic, however, coming in the wake of successive opinion polls showing a significant slump in the popularity of both the party and its leader, Mary Lou McDonald.

If they can’t pull off a major recovery before the next general election in the republic – widely expected in November 2024 but certainly by March 2025 – Ms McDonald is likely to join the ranks of ex-leaders.

Pro-union parties

Only one leadership change at the top of the NI parties appears to be scandal related (so far) – Jeffrey Donaldson MP stood down as Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader in March 2024 when he was charged with sex offences, including gross indecency towards a child, and in May the party founded by Ian Paisley confirmed Gavin Robinson MP in the top job.

Also in Northern Ireland, Doug Beattie MLA resigned as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ between himself and party officers. Mike Nesbitt MLA, who previously led the UUP between 2012 and 2017 and is widely considered to be a reformer, succeeded him in Sept. Nesbitt, NI’s Health Minister, had an unhealthy start to his second UUP leadership stint: having contracted Covid, he had to deliver his conference acceptance speech via video. Given Doug Beattie’s reason for resigning that may be the least of his troubles as he tries once more to lead the traditional party of unionism to contemporary political relevance.

The latest new leader

The third NI party refreshing its leadership was the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Reports suggested that members were energised by the change of leader – one journalist claiming that the conference ‘oozed energy, enthusiasm and optimism’ (Suzanne Breen, Belfast Telegraph).

Claire Hanna MP, who assumed leadership of the SDLP on 5 Oct, sounded like a woman with a plan and passion, which also came across when she gave the Wales Governance Centre Annual Lecture in Cardiff last December.

Ms Hanna’s background suggests she might have been in training all her life for politics – her mother was an SDLP member of the NI Assembly from 1998 to 2010 and was the politician who proposed and drove the inquiry into institutional child abuse. Her father was general secretary of the SDLP, having previously worked on development in the Connemara Gaeltacht (a designated Irish speaking area), in the west of Ireland, where Claire was born – but she first spent a decade in international development.

Anything in it for Wales?

Ms Hanna’s conference speech made some points that Welsh politicians could consider. Take one example:

‘not every challenge is a failure of finance from London, some are failures of imagination and leadership’.

She stressed the need to tackle ‘the borders in our minds’ and expanded on what social democracy means to her and the SDLP, in terms that sometimes sounded a lot like Plaid Cymru.

And Welsh indi activists might care to pause a moment:

‘… there isn’t a quick constitutional fix to all our problems… we’re dealing with people’s lives’ – but ‘constitutional change is worth pursuing, even against the weight of our history’.

I wrote in ‘Radicals & Realists: Political Parties in Ireland’ (2022) that, for the SDLP to thrive again, it needed a mission comparable to that of the party’s 1970 founders, based on generosity between Northern Ireland’s communities and on ‘parallel consent’, summed up in Seamus Mallon’s concept of ‘a shared home place’.That’s a real challenge for the party and its latest leader, which she seems to be taking seriously.

Lila Haines is the author of ‘Radicals & Realists: Political Parties in Ireland’, published by Welsh Academic Press in 2022, which is widely available in bookshops and online, as well as on Kindle.