Mary Lou McDonald

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Political career

McDonald began her political career by joining Fianna Fáil in 1998, but the party lost ground after a year due to fundamental policy differences, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland and social justice. When asked in 2014 about her Fianna Féin membership, McDonald said she had been "in the wrong party" and quickly realised that Sinn Féin was a more appropriate party for her Republican views after speaking with Sinn Féin members through the Irish National Congress.

Since 2001, McDonald has been a member of the Sinn Féin party leadership. She first ran for office in 2002 after losing 82% of first preference votes.

McDonald attracted backlash when she spoke at a rally in Dublin in September 2003 to commemorate Seán Russell, an IRA leader with ties to Nazi Germany.

When she was elected in 2004 as Sinn Féin's first MEP in Ireland, McDonald became Ireland's first MEP in Ireland, receiving over 60,000 first preference votes. She was one of two Sinn Féin MEPs, the other being Bairbre de Brn, who was representing Northern Ireland. "Most Valuable Work in the Field of Employment Policy" was shortlisted by the European Parliament magazine in 2007 for "most outstanding contribution in the field of labour policy." During her time in office, she led the Sinn Féin campaign against the Treaty of Lisbon, which was rejected in the Republic in 2008 but accepted in 2009. McDonald served as a member of the European Parliament's Employment and Social Affairs Committee and as a substitute for the Civil Liberties Committee.

At the 2007 general election, she was a losing candidate in the Dublin Central constituency.

After the Sinn Féin ardfheis of 22 February 2009, McDonald became Sinn Féin Vice President, replacing Pat Doherty.

The number of seats for Dublin in the European Parliament election in 2009 was reduced from four to three for the 2009 European Parliament election. McDonald was in a close contest for the last seat against Fianna Fáil's Eoin Ryan and the Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins. McDonald was forced to leave Higgins after being disqualified at the fifth count. Her first preference vote had fallen to almost 48,000.

McDonald's campaign office was chastised for selling IRA souvenirs and memorabilia in June 2009.

McDonald contested the Dublin Central Constituency again at the 2011 general election, this time garnering 13.1% of first preference votes; she was successful in obtaining the last seat in the constituency. Following the 2016 general election, she became Sinn Féin's Spokesperson for Public Expenditure and Reform and served as a member of the Public Accounts Committee from then to 2017.

By TV3's Tonight with Vincent Browne's political talk show, McDonald was named "Opposition Politician of the Year" in 2012.

McDonald decided not to leave the Dáil chamber in November 2014 after a vote resulted in her dismissal. McDonald asked Tánaiste Joan Burton whether the government would accept payments with citizens' salaries or social security contributions if they did not comply with the payment of recently introduced water charges. McDonald, according to McDonald, was unable to adequately answer her questions and was being deliberately evasive and intractable. In protest against Burton's suspected refusal to answer her questions, she and a number of Sinn Féin colleagues remained in the chamber for four and a half hours. The Ceann Comhairle Seán Barrett decided to postpone the Dáil for a few days as a result.

Despite being convicted of nine counts of tax evasion after a hearing in Dublin in 1999, McDonald first advocated Thomas "Slab" Murphy, who she referred to as a "good republican" despite being sentenced to death. After a BBC Spotlight probe found Murphy of being a "mass murderer," she later refused to support party leader Gerry Adams' argument that Thomas Murphy is a "good republican."

Following her re-election in the Dáil in 2016, she became Sinn Féin's All-Ireland Spokesperson for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, a role she held until being elected president of Sinn Féin in 2018.

Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin party's leader, was re-elected at a Sinn Féin party conference on November 18, but he announced that the Sinn Féin party leadership would invite a special Ard Fheis to be held within three months to elect a new president, and that he would not stand for re-election as a candidate for the Louth constituency in the upcoming election.

McDonald was confirmed as the President-elect of Sinn Féin on January 20, 2018, as the sole nominee to run. She was confirmed president at a special Ard Fheis on February 10th, 2018.

McDonald was chastised by some, including Fine Gael politician Simon Coveney, for walking behind a banner in New York City St. Patrick's day parade in March 2019. Sinn Féin's support in opinion polls has decreased from 18% to 13% in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, but McDonald apologizing for her behavior shortly afterwards, not the English people.

The 2019 European Parliament election in Ireland and the 2019 Irish municipal elections were held simultaneously on May 24th. Sinn Féin lost 2 MEPs and decreased their vote share by 8.8% in the European elections, while the party lost 78 (almost half) of their local councillors and dropped their vote share by 5.7% in the local elections. Sinn Féin's results were described as "disastrous" by the end. "It was a really bad day for us," McDonald said. But it's not always true in politics, and it's a test for you. "I'm sure it's a test for me personally, as the king."

The party recovered and gained 24.5% of the first preference votes in the 2020 general election, putting them ahead of Fine Gael by 3.6% and Fianna Fáil by 2.3%. It was the highest general election result in Sinn Féin's recent history. McDonald led the first preference vote in the Dublin Central constituency with 35.7%.

McDonald characterized the party's electoral triumph as a "revolution" and expressed her desire to create a coalition government, saying that Ireland "is no longer a two-party democracy." With the dramatic shift between Sinn Féin's tactics and the general election result of 2020, Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy praised McDonald's leadership and her ability to communicate Sinn Féin's policies to the voters. McDonald's high praise as the party leader was also cited by others as another contributing factor in Sinn Féin's success.

On June 26, 2020, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party formed a coalition government, leaving Sinn Féin as the country's largest opposition party and McDonald as the Opposition leader. She dismissed the coalition deal as a "marriage of convenience," and accuses Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of conspiring to exclude Sinn Féin from the government.

McDonald has been accused of being part of a new generation of Sinn Féin supporters, who have widened their appeal and increased the vote since she first held public office. "More Brown Thomas beret than balaclava" and "part of a new generation of Sinn Féiners" after she became the party's first MEP in 2004 (receiving more than treble the number of votes the party had gained five years earlier). The paper continued to state that "another Trinity graduate was elected in Donaghmede," according to the newspaper, although party candidates in Dublin included a philosophy scholar and someone named Pembroke, which is an odd term for a republican. The irony is that the smoked-salmon socialists are just as effective at mobilizing working-class votes as the middle-aged Sinn Fein men who saw 'action' in the 1980s or served time in jail. McDonald widened the Sinn Fein constituency to the fullest, attracting lands and transfers from leafy suburbs as well as ghettoes."

McDonald has been lauded for her leadership skills and popular appeal. "It is cliche to say that Mary Lou McDonald is an enigma," Kathy Sheridan of The Irish Times wrote about her. Likable, warm, and approachable, but she is still not fully revealing herself. Nothing that has not been investigated has been thoroughly considered by a straight-talker who seems to shoot from the hip yet says there is nothing that has not been considered. Sheridan also claimed that she was "the embodiment of educated, Dublin 6 middle-class privilege who presides on a persuasive anti-establishment line and attracts a nascent adoration scrums that weren't seen in Bertie Ahern's time." Sheridan argued that Sinn Féin had entered the mainstream of Irish politics. Sinn Féin was the most popular party in opinion polls as of November 2021 under her leadership.

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