Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald: 'Theresa May needs to lead'

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/22/sinn-fein-mary-lou-mcdonald-theresa-may-needs-to-lead-northern-ireland-power-sharing

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The Sinn Féin president, Mary Lou McDonald, has accused Theresa May of having “no plan, no map” for restoring power-sharing in Northern Ireland, and urged her to show decisive leadership in tackling the standoff.

After the prime minister held separate talks with Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party in Downing Street on Wednesday, McDonald said she had emerged from her hour-long meeting without a clear sense of how the UK government hoped to resolve the impasse.

“I, to my very great disappointment, discover when speaking to Theresa May that the British government have no plan, no map – it seems to me no strategy to actually deal with these matters, save to say to us: ‘We need a period of reflection,’” she told the Guardian.

“I’m not entirely sure what that means but I am entirely sure that that to me means inertia. That to me means the very dangerous prospect of a vacuum opening up; of rather than things getting better, things becoming more entrenched.”

She said instigating a period of reflection was not the way to treat the electorate in Northern Ireland, which has been without an assembly for 13 months with four rounds of talks failing to break the deadlock between Sinn Féin and the DUP.

McDonald said May’s deal with the DUP at Westminster, in which the unionist party MPs give the Tories a working majority, has undermined confidence in the British government’s role in resolving the crisis.

“The confidence and supply agreement causes a huge, huge problem: it robs even the pretence of impartiality in the minds of many; and I do have a concern, and I shared this with Theresa May, that she might soft-pedal, that she might put things off, in order to protect that arrangement.

“The other thing about the confidence and supply arrangement was the commitment to the Tories on Brexit.

“It’s not her words, it’s her actions: we’ve had words until we’ve nearly given each other migraines. In the final analysis, to get this sorted out, you can only judge and make a call when the words are silent and when you look to the actions.”

McDonald’s meeting with the prime minister was her first since taking over from Gerry Adams as the leader of Sinn Féin.

“She [May] needs to be decisive and I think she needs to lead,” said McDonald. “For a head of government not to have a thought-out, proactive position with Dublin, hand in hand, is to me alarming.”

She urged May to reconvene the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, the joint body that emerged from the Good Friday agreement that is meant to resolve non-devolved issues. Doing so, said McDonald, would provide the prime minister and the Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, with a formal two-island structure to oversee affairs in the region as well as provide a vehicle to establish power-sharing again.

The conference sat throughout the five-year suspension of the assembly in the early 2000s, with three ministerial meetings and one summit a year.

McDonald described a return to direct rule from Westminster as a non-starter. “Direct rule is an admission of failure, direct rule is unacceptable to us, direct rule is a turning back of the clock on progress,” she said.

In a wide-ranging interview, McDonald said Sinn Féin would not consider taking up its seven seats in the House of Commons even if it meant stopping Brexit, which the party opposes.

“We are an abstentionist party, I do not foresee us changing that position,” she said.

McDonald said voters in England were entitled to their view but needed to be reminded that Northern Ireland had voted to remain in the EU and that the UK government’s intention to leave the customs union and the single market could torpedo the Good Friday agreement (GFA).

“Brexit and the GFA are mutually incompatible. It’s as simple as that,” she said.

The Sinn Féin leader hit out at Brexiters, including the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan and the Labour MP Kate Hoey, who blamed the collapse of power-sharing on the Good Friday agreement, claiming it had run its course and was unsustainable.

“If anyone has become so debased in their view that they think it’s OK to trash the Good Friday agreement so that you get your way in terms of a hard Brexit, I think that speaks for itself and I think those people need to be challenged – challenged in the media and challenged politically,” McDonald said.

She went on to describe such talk as “cavalier” and “aggressive” and said the people of Northern Ireland would not put up with sniping from the sidelines.

“We will not be caught in this crossfire and left in a position where you imperil things that took decades to construct. I don’t think British public opinion would look favourably on something that puts a wrecking ball through progress in Ireland and through the process. I don’t think that would be a popular thing to do.”

She said she was also assured by the prime minister that this was not a view endorsed by the Conservative party: “Mrs May has told us that any of those sentiments expressed by Tories didn’t express the policy of the government.”

McDonald said: “[It] chimes so badly for Irish people to hear commentators from outside Ireland, in this bellicose manner, suggesting that something that we prize … should be set aside in that kind of cavalier, high-handed way.”

She said there was no “imminent danger” of a return to conflict but peace and reconciliation remained a work in progress.

“It would be a very, very foolish and a very irresponsible person who imagined that you take all that for granted; and worse, that you sabotage the very thing that has created that set of conditions [for peace]. That to me is crazy talk.”