The Long Game by Aoife Moore

Author:Aoife Moore [Moore, Aoife]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844885800
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

No one bought it. The dogs in the street knew who killed McCartney and yet everyone remained silent. Gerard ‘Jock’ Davison, a former IRA commander, was widely regarded as the man who gave the order to murder McCartney.

This was not a comfortable position for McDonald. In her first elected role, she was forced to comment on the horrific murder of an innocent man. A murder that had taken place where her fellow party members were present. A murder that went unsolved because information from republicans was not forthcoming. McDonald can’t have had any first-hand knowledge of whether or not there was a ‘culture of fear’ in Short Strand. The working-class Catholic enclave in Belfast was a world away from Brussels and Rathgar. She was defending the indefensible.

In this, she was only doing what every party member was expected to do. One senior staff member summarizes the position thus:

‘Whatever you think personally, you have to support it – the armed struggle. You can’t ever say one particular thing was disgusting, you always have to say that the conflict was wrong and all people suffered, that’s the line. You stick to the line.’

This staff member told me about a meeting at which the subject arose. ‘I remember asking during the meeting if there was a place for people in Sinn Féin who don’t support the armed struggle. Should we not have a situation where young people who join Sinn Féin feel free to say that what happened to Jean McConville was diabolical? I mean, what the fuck?

‘They all just looked at me,’ he said.

The staff member felt that the new generation of party members should not be bound by the movement’s iron fealty to the acts of the IRA.

‘Why should they have to defend what we defended? We know about it, we lived it, but that’s why we were involved in all of this and we may have an instinct to defend it even if we’re not totally on board. Young people shouldn’t be shackled like us. Others should be able to go and say: “I wasn’t even born, but by the way, what the fuck were those who did it thinking? It was wrong.”’

The 2007 general election was to be held on 24 May, and Sinn Féin were certain that it would see Mary Lou McDonald elected to the Dáil. Everything in their electoral arsenal was thrown at Mary Lou’s campaign, she had to get elected because of Adams’s ambitions for her.

It was decided she would run in Dublin Central, the diverse inner-city constituency of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. The previous general election had seen the Sinn Féin candidate for the area, former republican prisoner Nicky Kehoe, lose out on a seat by just fifty-seven votes. Everyone in the area assumed Kehoe would take another run at it, and rumours abounded of a rift within the party caused by McDonald’s standing in Dublin Central despite having no previous connection to the constituency. But party sources insist that Kehoe did not wish

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