Mary Lou McDonald: Not afraid of the 'shark's pond'

Once a member of Fianna Fáil and now ready to stand in Dublin Central, Mary Lou McDonald is the vanguard of domestication of Sinn Féin in the South. Profile by Colin Murphy

Mary Lou McDonald isn't officially on the Sinn Féin ticket in Dublin Central until endorsed by the selection convention on 1 December. With the backing of the leadership, and with local councillors Nicky Kehoe and Christy Burke nominating and seconding her, it's difficult to see any viable challenge. The real challenge is whether Kehoe and Burke can persuade not just their party colleagues, but their voters, to back her.

Kehoe describes Dublin Central, Bertie Ahern's constituency, as a "shark's pond". He doesn't suggest that Mary Lou will get eaten in it, but simply notes, "Dublin Central's all about delivery and work". Between the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and other established local politicians like Kehoe and Burke, Labour's Joe Costello and Independent Tony Gregory, the constituency has well developed community development structures and a history of local activism.

If Mary Lou McDonald is to take a seat here, two things are crucial – that she holds the existing Sinn Féin vote and brings in her own votes which haven't previously gone to the party.

On the face of it, this looks promising: Nicky Kehoe lost out to Bertie Ahern's running mate, Dermot Fitzpatrick, by just 74 votes in 2002. Kehoe and Christy Burke topped the poll in the 2004 local elections (in Cabra/Glasnevin and North Inner City, respectively), and McDonald polled over 14 per cent in the European Parliament election.

McDonald got the seat at least partially on the back of an extensive, and very photogenic, poster campaign. She is the vanguard of the domestication of Sinn Féin, with a raft of candidates whose southern Irish republicanism was born remote from the Troubles, appealing to young voters with leftish leanings but little inclination for militancy, or even for particularly firm ideology.

Councillor Nicky Kehoe's vote, in particular, is a strong personal vote in a very specific area of the constituency: Kehoe is born and reared in Cabra, and long involved in the local St Finbar's GAA club. Of his 3,600 votes in the local election, 2,700 of these were from Cabra, with 900 dispersed across the rest of the ward. (Contrary to rumours that the leadership had forced him to make way for McDonald, Kehoe says he decided over a year ago not to contest the next general election.)

On the face of it, Fianna Fáil's second seat is the one that looks most vulnerable – despite Bertie Ahern dominating the constituency and having polled no less that 1.5 quotas in each of the last four general elections. Vote management should guarantee a second seat on those numbers, yet Fitzpatrick was lucky to scrape in last time out, and in 1992 Ahern was elected alone, with the late Jim Mitchell taking the last seat ahead of Dermot Fitzpatrick.

In 1997, Marian McGennis took the fourth seat for Fianna Fáil, despite controversy over the party's vote management: the constituency then crossed south of the river to Ballyfermot, and McGennis was left, by party agreement, to canvass for number ones on her southside home patch. Bertie Ahern's team reportedly broke the agreement and crossed the river. (Ahern polled over 12,000 first preferences, to McGennis's 3,132.)

If McDonald takes a seat, she may become the leader of the Sinn Féin group in the Dáil. As one Sinn Féin activist put it, whatever the formalities, she's likely to become the de facto voice of Sinn Féin. Even as a European parliamentarian, she regularly features in the Irish media on diverse issues, often without reference to her European mandate: she has called for "an all-Ireland response to the bird flu threat".

In the European Parliament itself, she has spoken nine times at plenary sessions, mostly in Irish, including a brief statement on the occasion of the IRA disbandment.

But despite her oft-cited media friendliness, her prepared public statements hew rigorously to bland repetitions of the party line, and her off-the-cuff remarks are often vague or inconsequential.

Her recent interview with Ursula Halligan on TV3's The Political Party was a case in point: McDonald's answers to leading questions about the next election – presumably the issue she was there to discuss – were bland to the point of meaninglessness. On the prospects for Sinn Féin going into government, she said: "I very much take the view that the people will decide in their collective wisdom who is returned to the Dáil and then, on the basis of that reality, it will then emerge what is possible or not possible in terms of governance and in terms of coalition."

Asked about her hopes for the election, she said "I hope we have a really good debate, the kind of debate that we need around the social and economic issues". She went slightly further on her political philosophy in an interview with Kevin Rafter. She told Rafter, "it's not that we're anti-enterprise or that we frown on ambition or wealth creation. We don't dislike wealth but we do have a difficulty with poverty. It (left-wing politics) is about the generation of wealth but then crucially it's a question of how you distribute it. And, yes, it is about public services. Access to public services is bound up with ownership of those services, and we believe that in certain essential areas the State has a legitimate role in terms of service provision" (cited in Rafter's Sinn Féin 1905-2005: In the Shadow of Gunmen).

Outside of her politics, McDonald appears almost hostile to interest in her background or personal life. Aged 36, she is married to Martin Lanigan and is expecting their second child in the new year. A young mother, commuting between Dublin, Strasbourg and Brussels, and also regularly travelling across Ireland in her role as Sinn Féin national chairperson – Ursula Halligan asked her how did she manage. "I've great family support, and I've also very good political support", was as far as her answer went.

McDonald now lives in Castleknock, just outside her chosen Dáil constituency, and was born and reared south of the river, in Rathgar. She went to school at the fee-paying Catholic school, Notre Dame, and then studied English literature at Trinity, where she got involved in the college Fianna Fáil cumann. Through the 1990s she did postgraduate study at both the University of Limerick and Dublin City University, and worked as a part-time researcher in the Institute of European Affairs and later in the Irish Productivity Centre.

It's a classically south Dublin middle class background, and the question is often asked of McDonald (and often asked snidely), what brought her to Sinn Féin. She told Kevin Rafter:

"I was just in the wrong party. I didn't feel that Fianna Fáil had within it the capacity to deliver on the things I felt were very important – on the national question, in terms of driving national reunification, but also, and equally important, in terms of issues of equality and issues of social justice."

Should Sinn Féin confound the recent statements by Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, and enter coalition, McDonald could find herself a Minister on her first day in Dáil Eireann. But to do so, she first has to get through the "sharks' pond" of Dublin Central – and convince Nicky Kehoe and Christy Burke's core voters that she can deliver on more than wooly ideas of equality and justice.p