Mary Lou McDonald does a sharp line in scorn. When Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar, and other party chiefs said they would not rule with her nationalist Sinn Féin party, she retorted: “These three wise men of failed government and broken promises still believe that they’re going to have things all their own way.”
As it turned out, it was McDonald who got her own way — in a seismic election victory last weekend that took her party, long on the fringes, to the brink of power in Dublin. Sinn Féin was a political pariah for decades because of its support for the IRA’s deadly 30-year campaign to force Britain out of Northern Ireland. Now McDonald has engineered a historic leap forward for the party in the Irish Republic, breaking the duopoly of established parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, that have dominated since the 1920s.
This made her a contender to succeed Varadkar, becoming the first female taoiseach, after winning the popular vote and the second-highest number of seats in the Dáil assembly. She would use a place in government to campaign for a referendum on a united Ireland, the party’s number one objective. “Now is our time,” she told a packed meeting of newly elected MPs on Thursday. It was an echo of the IRA war cry “Tiocfaidh ár lá,” or “Our day will come.”
Yet McDonald, aged 50, presents a different image to the generation of leaders who took the IRA into the peace agreement. Sinn Féin’s many critics recoil at the IRA’s legacy of murder and lawlessness. McDonald insists the war is over. Once she took a television crew on a supermarket shopping trip. The image was far removed from balaclava-wearing paramilitaries. Instead it was of a busy working mother of two checking the price of prawns and seeking out a breakfast cereal. “The Mary Lou factor is huge, especially among a lot of women,” said Aengus Ó Snodaigh, a Sinn Féin MP since 2002.
Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein, address members of Sinn Fein, newly elected to the Irish Parliament, in Dublin, Ireland, on Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020.
Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg
McDonald grew up in Rathgar, a middle-class suburb of Dublin. She was educated at a private Catholic school before attending Trinity College Dublin, an elite university that was a bastion of British rule for centuries. She first joined Fianna Fáil, long the country’s biggest party. But her friend Nora Comiskey, a veteran Fianna Fáil activist, said her departure was no surprise: “One night she was talking about united Ireland ideas and the way people should be treated by their government, and I said to her casually: ‘You’re in the wrong party, Mary Lou. I don’t think that’s Fianna Fáil at all.’ I missed her greatly.”
Gerry Adams, McDonald’s predecessor, marked her out early as a potential Sinn Féin leader. As a young politician on the rise in 2004, she helped carry the coffin of Joe Cahill, a veteran IRA chief who was a colossus in the republican movement. Her rhetoric can be strident but her down-to-earth manner and personal warmth on the doorsteps cut through with voters and made a stark contrast with the stiff Varadkar.
“She’s a breath of fresh air,” said Jamie Morrissey, a personal trainer from Limerick, one of many young people who turned to Sinn Féin at the ballot box, put off by the stale politics of the established parties. “She is good on the canvass trail and comes across as friendly and good-humoured, and communicates well with the ordinary voter,” said Deaglán de Bréadún, author of a book on Sinn Féin’s rise in mainstream politics. “She can also be tough and formidable.”
McDonald now holds the balance of power in a highly fragmented parliament but lacks allies for a majority. Her efforts to team up with the Greens and other left-wing parties came to nothing on Friday as the party accepted it will need to align with one of its big rivals. Neither Fine Gael’s Varadkar, nor Micheál Martin, leader of Fianna Fáil, will work with her because of Sinn Féin’s IRA links and its promises to ramp up spending and taxes on the wealthy and business. The established parties claim Sinn Féin’s leftist agenda will put Ireland’s economy, which is highly dependent on foreign direct investment, at risk.
Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald celebrates with supporters after topping the poll in Dublin central at the RDS count centre in Dublin, Ireland, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020.
Peter Morrison /
Associated Press
Barely eight months ago, Sinn Féin did not seem like much of a threat. McDonald’s leadership was in trouble after the party sunk to less than 10 per cent in local elections. But they changed tactics. “They were all about shouting from the sidelines and crying crisis, and suddenly they came up with solutions,” said Ipsos pollster Kieran O’Leary.
McDonald’s party stressed its own proposals to improve the health service and address Ireland’s chronic shortage of affordable housing. Her political opponents said these were unrealistic but they struck a chord, especially with the young.
In the years of austerity following Ireland’s 2008 crash, McDonald threw herself into social causes. She backed the repeal of a constitutional ban on abortion, becoming a prominent liberal face in a 2018 referendum that passed by a two-thirds majority. “Sinn Féin captured the mood quite well: that we cannot be prisoners of our past,” says O’Leary.
One persistent criticism is that McDonald is not fully in control of a party that is still in thrall to people with IRA links. Peadar Tóibín, who left Sinn Féin over its support for abortion, said its discipline was a strength but also a weakness. “There’s no room for dissent . . . she’s a cog in the system rather than the driver of the vehicle. She doesn’t have the same political gravity that Gerry Adams had, in the sense that not all wings of the party would really warm to her,” he said. “That could cause her problems in the future.”
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the NDP is caving to political pressure from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre when it comes to their stance on the consumer carbon price.
Trudeau says he believes Jagmeet Singh and the NDP care about the environment, but it’s “increasingly obvious” that they have “no idea” what to do about climate change.
On Thursday, Singh said the NDP is working on a plan that wouldn’t put the burden of fighting climate change on the backs of workers, but wouldn’t say if that plan would include a consumer carbon price.
Singh’s noncommittal position comes as the NDP tries to frame itself as a credible alternative to the Conservatives in the next federal election.
Poilievre responded to that by releasing a video, pointing out that the NDP has voted time and again in favour of the Liberals’ carbon price.
British Columbia Premier David Eby also changed his tune on Thursday, promising that a re-elected NDP government would scrap the long-standing carbon tax and shift the burden to “big polluters,” if the federal government dropped its requirements.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister responsible for consumer protection, has tabled a bill to force merchants to calculate tips based on the price before tax.
That means on a restaurant bill of $100, suggested tips would be calculated based on $100, not on $114.98 after provincial and federal sales taxes are added.
The bill would also increase the rebate offered to consumers when the price of an item at the cash register is higher than the shelf price, to $15 from $10.
And it would force grocery stores offering a discounted price for several items to clearly list the unit price as well.
Businesses would also have to indicate whether taxes will be added to the price of food products.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
Quebec legislature member Youri Chassin has announced he’s leaving the Coalition Avenir Québec government to sit as an Independent.
He announced the decision shortly after writing an open letter criticizing Premier François Legault’s government for abandoning its principles of smaller government.
In the letter published in Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec, Chassin accused the party of falling back on what he called the old formula of throwing money at problems instead of looking to do things differently.
Chassin says public services are more fragile than ever, despite rising spending that pushed the province to a record $11-billion deficit projected in the last budget.
He is the second CAQ member to leave the party in a little more than one week, after economy and energy minister Pierre Fitzgibbon announced Sept. 4 he would leave because he lost motivation to do his job.
Chassin says he has no intention of joining another party and will instead sit as an Independent until the end of his term.
He has represented the Saint-Jérôme riding since the CAQ rose to power in 2018, but has not served in cabinet.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
