The Invisible Man

Anthony McIntyre ☠ I have never met Michelle O'Neill, but after suffering all the forgettable straitlaced dullards who have served as First Minister in the North it is hard not to be somewhat enamoured of her public persona.

Earthy, no airs and graces, a rapid fire parochial accent to cut through you, somebody with real life experience - the type who didn't learn to swim in the library - and far removed from the stodgy patrician characters that are all too often to be found in the corridors of power. Not that Stormont, the British equivalent of a South African Bantustan, has any power other than formal with meaningless trappings to boot. But that is a fish to fry another day. Whatever it is they do up in Uselesstan, Michelle O'Neill brings a dash of élan rather than ennui to proceedings.

Still, she has found herself embroiled in a controversy because her party has once again been accused of what many believe it does best - cover up. Today's front page Irish News story about the text life of erstwhile Senate leader Niall Ó Donnghaile serves to keep the pot boiling beneath the lid of a party, whose leaders are averse to the insight of Harold J. Smith: more people would learn from their mistakes if they weren't so busy denying them.

When Michael McMonagle, the former Sinn Fein press official recently convicted of child sex offences and now facing a custodial sentence, asked two colleagues to provide him with a reference, they did so. These were supplied despite the party being aware he was under investigation by the PSNI in relation to issues of child protection, for which he had been cut adrift by Sinn Fein. Armed with those references McMonagle applied for and received a post with the British Heart Foundation. Whatever about Caolan McGinley's role the more senior press officer, Sean Mag Uidhir, is a man of vast experience, with an astute understanding of the contours of politics. WTF he was thinking when he put his name to the reference for now remains one of life's mysteries. He alone can explain that. Although both he and McGinley might have cause to feel hard done by in the light of the party leader's glowing reference for Niall Ó Donnghaile who too found himself walking the plank for sending inappropriate messages to a teenager. The leader's prerogative: don't do as I do - do as I say.

The same prerogative might be said to apply when it comes to Sinn Fen admonishing the Catholic Church over its handling of child abuse. Conor Murphy in a frosty BBC interview insisted that it was not the responsibility of the party to tell the British Heart Foundation about the PSNI investigation into the suspected paedophile the party had just peddled on to the Foundation. We can imagine the type of public outcry that would assail the ears of a bishop were he to claim it was not the Church hierarchy's responsibility to alert the school it had just recycled a priest to that the cleric was under police investigation for child sex offences.

Michael McMonagle cuts a lonely figure in the footage showing him entering Derry courthouse accompanied by no one, either family members or party officials. Abandoned and abhorred, his possible mental health concerns considered much less worthy than those of Niall Ó Donnghaile. Isolated as he might well be, he is definitely not invisible.

Despite this Michelle O'Neill claims not to have seen him in a room yards from her in conditions of clear visibility when he was attending an event in his new role as an employee of the BHF. Echoes of Bismarck: Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied. It cannot be proved beyond reasonable doubt that she did see him but the balance of probability points to a different conclusion. In the court of public opinion probability counts in a way that it would not in a court of law. As Patrick Murphy caustically observed:

He was particularly skilled, because while his presence could be detected by cameras in Stormont, he was entirely invisible to the human eye.

Sinn Fein, not without some justification, claims that its opponents in the Dublin government and rivals on the opposition benches are driven less by concern for children and more by political considerations, particularly so as a general election approaches. That however cuts both ways. Whatever the motives, the necessary scrutiny that should always be in place seems to have been nowhere near as vigorous in Stormont as it was in Leinster House. For all Sinn Fein's claims about politically driven scrutinization in the Dublin parliament, the lack of such scrutiny in the Belfast parliament also seems to have been driven by politics as was lucidly explained by Patrick Murphy's description of Stormont, 'where 79 of the 90 MLAs are in a government devoted to self-preservation'.

The inference to be drawn is that Sinn Fein believes it prospers best in situations where its activities are not transparent and as such will continue striving to maintain the party as a cold house for scrutiny.

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