The Mary Lou Effect

What a few months it’s been for Mary Lou McDonald. After coming through a rather difficult year of elections, both north and south, the mainstream media couldn’t wait to write her off and had the juicy headlines about her leadership typed and ready to publish… and then the February 2020 election happened. I am a Gerry generation Republican, as are many people. Gerry became our Uachtarán in 1983, and so for almost 4 decades, he and Martin McGuinness were the faces of Sinn Féin. Both men having come through the conflict, are rightly credited with bringing the republican movement to peace and getting them on the side of the Good Friday Agreement. Republicans and Irish history will never forget them, because they are integral to where we are today. Even that in itself is an understatement. So when Mary Lou McDonald brought her own shoes to the RDS in Dublin in February 2018 to take the baton off Gerry as Uachtarán, a new era began. A Dublin woman with a new style of republicanism is what many believed we needed. To have a Ballymurphy man leading your party for most of your life, to a Cabra woman 21 years younger than him, change was in the air and a new direction was being taken. Of course, what many love about Mary Lou is that she is still a rebel. She was trusted with this position and vowed to keep us on track and advance us even further to our ultimate goal of reunification. Personally, what I love about Mary Lou is that she has shown how strong republicanism still is. Many on the outside like to pretend Sinn Féin is the party of the oul boys, who were involved in the struggle back in the day, and that young people don’t care about the past as much as Sinn Féin do, and therefore the party’s popularity will eventually start to fall once their stalwart base die off. Mary Lou disproved that; a southern woman who grew up over a hundred miles away from the border but is still as passionate about our history and even more so about our future than anyone else. People don’t look at Mary Lou and immediately think of the conflict. In fact, after the last election, it is evident that many people look at her and see someone who they want as Taoiseach. The tide is turning on Irish politics, and Sinn Féin caught the wave at the right time. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were told where to go in the last election and the electorate instead put their trust in Mary Lou and the likes of Eoin Ó Broin, Pearse Doherty and Louise O’Reilly. While FFG were fixated on digging up the past and doing what they could to ‘expose’ the party, our representatives were out listening to the people and creating solutions for the parents who have had to move them and their children back in with their own parents because they can’t afford their mortgage, the people laying on trolleys for obscene amounts of time, and those struggling to feed their families on a zero hour contract. They were doing what they are elected to do, and instead of obsessing over themselves and their ego, they worked on behalf of the people – ar son na nDaoine. Finally, what a breath of fresh air it was to see a strong female sticking it to Micheál and Leo – and not apologising or ever backing down from it. It is no secret that females are underrepresented in politics, and although it is much better than it used to be, it is nowhere near ideal. To see our fierce and articulate female leader stand on the national stage and demand to be taken seriously is a powerful thing, something that the Irish electorate witnessed a few times over the last few months. As a young woman interested in politics, I know I am the envy of many of my politico peers to have Mary Lou as my party leader, and long may it continue. I hope those shoes she brought two years ago are sturdy enough, it seems she’ll be in them for a good while.

le Amy Hamilton