Opinion

Deaglán de Bréadún: Mary Lou and Bertie encounter fuels political speculation

Bertie Ahern. Picture by Justin Farrelly/PA Wire
Bertie Ahern. Picture by Justin Farrelly/PA Wire Bertie Ahern. Picture by Justin Farrelly/PA Wire

IT WAS a big day: January 7, 1922. By a majority of seven votes, 64 to 57, Dáil Éireann ratified the Anglo-Irish Treaty to establish the Irish Free State (now Republic of Ireland) with the same Dominion status as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other places.

Since the political forebears of Fine Gael were its main supporters, it’s not surprising that current party leader and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar gave a special address last Friday to mark the centenary.

His speech was part of a “live virtual event” streamed by the party on Facebook. Varadkar quoted chief negotiator Arthur Griffith, who said the treaty gave the Irish people “a foothold in their own country; it gives them solid ground on which to stand”. The tánaiste also quoted the words of Michael Collins, who said the vote was not “any kind of triumph over the other side” and did his best to prevent the civil war that erupted the following June.

Unfortunately for ‘The Big Fellow’, he was shot dead in his native County Cork on August 22 that year, in an ambush by opponents of the treaty. A grand-niece of his, former justice minister Nora Owen, gave some moving recollections after the tánaiste’s address, where she spoke of how Collins had dropped in on relatives in Clonakilty, the day he was killed. Those present included her mother Kitty, who was ten years old at the time. High-spirited Uncle Mick tried to give her a hug but the youngster refused, on the basis that she was “too old” for such avuncular displays of affection. Just after eight o’clock that very evening, he would be dead.

Meanwhile another, more recent, hug featured in photographs last week on the front pages of different Dublin-based newspapers. The occasion was the funeral of Chris Wall, former member of Seanad Éireann and close associate of Bertie Ahern. The pictures showed the ex-taoiseach receiving an embrace of sympathy from Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald (both of them wearing anti-Covid masks, it should be said). The location was St Peter’s Church, Phibsborough in the Dublin Central constituency that Ahern represented in the Dáil for three decades from 1981 and where Deputy McDonald has been a TD since 2011.

Attending funerals of constituents is a near-compulsory part of an Irish politician’s life, but this was no ordinary event. The deceased was a big name in Fianna Fáil and a leading figure in the world of Irish athletics. Indeed, when I last met him, he talked about Mary Lou’s time as a member of the same party for about a year in the late 1990s. She was his next-door neighbour.

Possible political implications of the Mary Lou-Bertie encounter became the talk of the town. Ahern resigned from Fianna Fáil under controversial circumstances ten years ago, but his name is still synonymous with FF and the Sinn Féin leader’s friendly gesture gave some impetus to speculation that the two parties could join together in government sometime.

An Ireland Thinks poll in last weekend’s Sunday Independent has SF in first place at 33 per cent, with Fine Gael on 23 points and Fianna Fáil at 19 per cent. But when asked for their preferred combination in a coalition government, 38 per cent opted for the existing line-up of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, with 34 per cent choosing a Sinn Féin-led administration including the Greens, Labour and others on the left. A Sinn Féin-Fianna Fáil alliance scored only 10 per cent and a SF-Fine Gael combination got a measly three per cent.

Yet there will be a significant element of Fianna Fáil who have qualms about the marriage of convenience with Fine Gael, because they feel it undermines FF’s traditional republican identity. This feeling is likely to increase as further events from 1922 are recalled. Looking at the list of TDs who opposed the treaty, names of those shot dead in the subsequent civil war leap out, such as Harry Boland, Cathal Brugha, Erskine Childers and Liam Mellows. But the pro-treaty names also include figures who perished in the internecine conflict: not just Collins but fellow-Corkman Seán Hales and, in a delayed act of revenge in 1927, Kevin O’Higgins. The most divisive issue was the Oath of Fidelity to the British Crown and that was eventually removed, by peaceful parliamentary means, when Fianna Fáil achieved power through the democratic process.

Email: Ddebre1@aol.com; Twitter: @DdeBreadun