Last weekend McDonald became Sinn Fein’s first MEP, polling almost 14.5% of the vote in Dublin, more than treble what the party returned five years ago. More Brown Thomas beret than balaclava, McDonald is part of a new generation of Sinn Feiners. Another Trinity graduate was elected in Donaghmede, while party candidates in Dublin also included a philosophy student and somebody called Pembroke, an unlikely name for a republican.
The irony is that the smoked-salmon socialists are just as effective at mopping up working-class votes as the middle-aged Sinn Fein men who saw “action” in the 1980s or served time in prison. McDonald stretched the Sinn Fein constituency to the full, attracting votes and transfers from leafy suburbs as well as ghettoes.
Not that she brings a more bourgeois slant to republicanism. A polished media performer, McDonald does Sinn Fein-speak as fluently as Gerry Adams. Last week she used all the party’s usual defence mechanisms against questions about decommissioning of IRA weapons and the release of Garda Jerry McCabe’s killers. A typical riposte was: “I will come to that in a minute but the important point I am making at this juncture is . . .”
McDonald was never a member of the IRA, and has held for some time the view that Ireland should only be reunited by peaceful means. Eleven years ago, before the first IRA ceasefire, a 23-year-old McDonald made a 20-minute speech at a forum on Northern Ireland organised by the Irish National Congress (INC). Finian McGrath, now a TD, recalls: “She made a really powerful speech on the need to pursue democratic and peaceful means. I would say she could only feel comfortable joining Sinn Fein once they had committed themselves to peaceful methods.”
Her political career started in Fianna Fail. Brian Lenihan, a junior minister, says McDonald never complained that Fianna Fail wasn’t radical enough for her, but significantly she did express reservations about some parts of the Good Friday agreement.
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Fianna Fail is now muttering that McDonald is a “careerist”, but nobody leaves Ireland’s biggest and most successful party for Sinn Fein in order to improve their chances of being elected. “I began feeling like I was in the wrong party,” she says. “I didn’t see the capacity to address the issues that mattered, like social justice and equality. Also, the only party that can drive reunification is Sinn Fein.”
Not that politics is McDonald’s only motivation. A campaign worker says the Sinn Fein MEP’s other great passion is shopping. “She’s a complete shopaholic,” says the female associate. “ Even with the hectic election campaign she found time to pop into shops.”
Born in 1969 in well-to-do Rathgar, McDonald’s family were ambitious Fianna Fail supporters. One of Patrick and Joan McDonald’s sons is a scientist in America, while their other daughter is a teacher in Terenure College.
McDonald’s earliest political memory was the hunger strikes of 1981, when she 12. “Anyone who was a child at that time could never forget those images,” she says. “It was then that I realised that something strange was going on in Ireland.”
She went to fee-paying Notre Dame in Churchtown, and then to take English literature at Trinity in 1987. She admitted on Bloomsday last week that her education hadn’t stretched to reading Ulysses. Her lasting legacy from Trinity appears to have been a radicalisation of her politics. While in college she became involved in campaigns for students’ rights, including abortion information for women.
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She seems to have been planless after leaving Trinity, eventually doing a masters in European integration at the University of Limerick. After several months of unemployment she qualified for a state-run back-to-work scheme, and got a job as a part-time research officer for the Institute of European Affairs. Working 20 hours a week, the job was less glamorous and important than some McDonald supporters portrayed it during her European campaign. “She was certainly working on policy issues of the day, such as the euro,” says a former colleague. “But there was plenty of stuffing envelopes and photocopying too. She did get on remarkably well with other people.”
McDonald then returned to university, studying industrial relations at Dublin City University, and got a job with the Irish Productivity Centre in 1999. Set up by Sean Lemass in 1963, its aim is to help companies be more competitive. “She was very bright, and articulate, and knew what she wanted,” recalls Tom McGuinness of the centre. At the beginning of 2002 she became a full-time employee of Sinn Fein, the party to which she had defected.
She stood in that year’s general election in Dublin West, polling 2,404 votes. This was a creditable showing, given that she shared the constituency with Joe Higgins, a socialist with a strong personal following.
McDonald had deployed the usual Sinn Fein tactic of wowing the working classes by talking tough on drugs. Her constituency was home to the Westies, a notorious drugs gang, and McDonald organised a public meeting to let locals vent their anger and frustration. The hoodlums are said to have told McDonald to back off, and the Sinn Fein spin machine insists their girl stood up to the gangsters and ignored the threats.
Political opponents accuse McDonald of taking a genteel approach, however. Ruth Coppinger, a socialist councillor in Dublin West, says: “She certainly wasn’t around when it came to confrontations on the ground with the state over the issue of bin taxes.”
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Sinn Fein was impressed enough with McDonald’s performance in Dublin West to nominate her as early as March last year as its European candidate in the capital, clearly a prime target for its Brussels breakthrough.
Mark Daly, a councillor in Tallaght, did contest the nomination — unusual for a party that puts a high premium on presenting a united front — but he was so far behind in the vote that the party spared his blushes by simply announcing McDonald as the winner.
Sinn Fein instantly set about boosting McDonald’s profile. She accompanied Gerry Adams to meetings at Downing Street, and was given a job of co-ordinating all the party’s elected representatives on the island, which provided lots of photo opportunities during last autumn’s Assembly elections in Northern Ireland.
Keeping all of the party’s councillors “on message” means that few are as good as McDonald at delivering Sinn Fein’s single transferable speech. But some internal detractors noted that during the last general election campaign she made a complete mess of explaining the party’s motor insurance policy during a radio interview.
Eight years ago McDonald married Martin Lanigan, a clerk with Bord Gais, and the couple have one daughter. They live in a typical semi-detached house in Castleknock. McDonald’s husband has followed her into Sinn Fein, as has her sister.
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Juggling the demands of a young family with the weekly commute to Brussels and Strasbourg is likely to be too demanding for McDonald to sustain as a long-term career. Party colleagues say she was not even the most dedicated of campaigners during the election, and it was a cabal of strong-minded women around her that did the heavy lifting. They included Maria Doherty, a daughter of Pat, the MP.
Sinn Fein likes an international dimension — it maintains offices in London and Washington — but it is likely to encourage McDonald to contest the next general election in Dublin, and to nominate a substitute MEP if she is successful. The party’s current line-up in the Dail is noticeably lacklustre, the likes of Sean Crowe and Arthur Morgan are making no impact, and Sinn Fein could do with somebody of her abilities as its leader in the House.
From arms to peace, from middle-aged working-class men to middle-class young women, McDonald epitomises Sinn Fein’s drift into politics. And there’s plenty more university graduates like her — who are prepared to turn a blind eye to the nefarious activities of the IRA — being groomed for parachuting into working-class areas.