Election Looms After Sinn Féin’s Week

Sinn Féin, the lead Opposition party, has experienced a tumultuous political week full of relentless negative publicity. It had to contend with back-to-back scandals that sprouted up last weekend. The first issue raised was in regard to an unknown high-ranking member from the North who left Sinn Féin last year after they were discovered to be sending inappropriate texts to a minor of 17 years. The subsequent incident was the surprising withdrawal from the party by long-standing Laois TD Brian Stanley, who claimed that Sinn Féin unjustly treated him during an internal inspection relating to an undisclosed complaint about him, and then within a subsequent counter-complaint.

Early on Monday, Mary Lou McDonald, the party leader, had to justify why Sinn Féin reported the Stanley case to the Garda the day following Stanley’s resignation. By Tuesday’s afternoon, she conceded in a crowded Dáil assembly that Niall Ó Donnghaile, Sinn Féin’s former leader in the Seanad, was the high-ranking official involved in the texting scandal. This resulted in additional inquiries about the three-month interval between Ó Donnghaile’s exit from the party and his resignation as a senator, during which he was publicly praised by McDonald.

McDonald’s speech was referred to as “a chronicle of missteps and it wasn’t Sinn Féin’s error. It was merely a regrettable series of oversight incidents,” in Miriam Lord’s Dáil sketch. Sinn Féin’s incredibly challenging week caps off a tough year marked by polling setbacks and the unveiling that two party press agents had endorsed a former coworker, Michael McMonagle, despite him being under investigation for child sex crimes which he has since been found guilty of.

The potential impact of recent developments on the party’s success in the impending general election, likely to happen at the end of November, remains uncertain. This suspicion was heightened by Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, and was further supported when Roderic O’Gorman, leader of the Green, expressed his wish for a November 29th vote on Friday.

Justine McCarthy, a columnist, anticipated on Friday that McDonald’s possibility of becoming the first female taoiseach could have been significantly undermined following this week’s occurrences. However, Political Editor Pat Leahy had his doubts. He wondered whether the election would focus on Sinn Féin’s culture, individual scandals, or the myriad unresolved issues surrounding the party and its leader. The forthcoming weeks will prove revealing.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
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