Child abuse scandals are submersibles that plumb the murky depths of an institution’s mentality. They take us fathoms down into its otherwise unfathomable instincts.
So it was with the Catholic church – so it is now with Sinn Féin. And where these probes land is in the same place: the mental abyss in which it is impossible to think of cruel acts from the point of view of the victim.
Tempting though it is, this is not a moment for smug satisfaction at the travails of a party whose default mode is moral superiority. Like it or not, everyone on the island has an interest in Sinn Féin becoming a better, healthier, more open and democratic organisation.
It is likely to be the largest party in Northern Ireland for a long time to come and, even if its (always presumptuous) expectations of forming the Republic’s next government are now effectively dashed, it will remain a formidable presence in the political life of the State.
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For the good of our democracy, we need a lot more than trite “learnings”. We need Sinn Féin to engage with its own collective Id. It must investigate the impulses and assumptions that made it possible for two party officials to write job references for Michael McMonagle, who had been questioned about (and later admitted to) sex offences against children, and for Mary Lou McDonald (in effect) to cover up the reasons for the resignation of the party’s leader in the Seanad, Niall Ó Donnghaile.
I fully accept that most members of Sinn Féin are genuinely repelled by the revelation of this continuing pattern of behaviour. But if they are, they must ask themselves the most searching and uncomfortable question: what is it about our organisation that perpetuates those patterns?
The answer cannot be delivered in bureaucracy-speak. Responding to the revelation of the McMonagle affair, McDonald resorted to the language of management consultancy. She has asked the party’s incoming general secretary to “immediately initiate a complete overhaul of governance procedures”.
We’ve been here before. Six years ago, in August 2018, after several of the party’s local councillors had quit over what they alleged to be a culture of bullying in which unelected officials sought to impose their will on elected representatives, The Irish Times reported that “party leader Mary Lou McDonald has now assigned a senior figure in her team to carry out an examination of the party’s structures and to report back to the ard comhairle”.
Remind me what Albert Einstein (and Roy Keane) said about doing the same thing while expecting different results.
Structures and procedures matter but not nearly as much as mentalities and cultures. Governance in Sinn Féin is hierarchical and driven by obedience. Which is why it responds to child abuse within its ranks more or less as the Catholic hierarchy did. The offending party official, like the abusive priest, is one of us, and therefore to be treated with compassion and understanding. The victim is a problem to be managed with the least possible damage to the trust of the believers whose simple faith must not be eroded by scandal.
What McDonald should be instigating is not just a review of the party’s governance. It’s a complete and honest overhaul of the habit of mind in which every act of abuse by an insider must be seen first and foremost from the perspective of the perpetrator. That habit is not casual, and it is not unconnected to Sinn Féin’s past as the political wing of the IRA.
Deep in its DNA, and still implicit in the way it thinks about the Troubles, is a reflexive minimisation of the suffering of victims. Victims, in its grand narrative, are an unfortunate inconvenience.
What we see with both McMonagle and Ó Donnghaile is kindness, care, consideration – for them. The instinct with McMonagle was to ensure that his life was not going to be ruined by the mere fact that he was being investigated for attempting to lure a child into having sex with him. The party helped him get a good job with the British Heart Foundation.
In the case of Ó Donnghaile, he was allowed to resign with no reference to the reason – his sending of inappropriate text messages to a 16 year-old member of Ógra Shinn Féin. McDonald praised his political contributions and expressed the hope that he could “overcome the health challenges that he has had to deal with over the past number of months”.
In her responses to the revelations last week, McDonald continued to express her concerns about Ó Donnghaile’s mental health – while saying nothing at all about the “health challenges” of the boy he subjected to unwanted attention. She declined to enter what the boy called, in a statement to the Sunday Independent, the “dark spaces” of a teenager struggling to deal with a deeply unsettling situation.
The sense of deja vu is dizzying. McDonald spoke on Morning Ireland of her job in all of this as “managing human behaviour, failures, mistakes” – rather than crimes against or damage to children.
And Ó Donnghaile’s target wrote on Sunday of his feeling, when he tried to get the party to act in early 2023, of being left to confront “a titanic power dynamic that made me feel as if I had no chance of having my voice heard”. Dress Cardinal McDonald and her bishops in episcopal robes and it’s a movie we’ve all seen before.
McDonald isn’t stupid – she’s extremely smart. So how do she and her senior colleagues end up reinforcing a “power dynamic” that is Titanic as well as “titanic”: crushing for the victim but also a metaphor for the party’s self-destructive hubris? Because of a habit of celebrating perpetrators as heroes while keeping their casualties as far from the surface of collective consciousness as possible.
If you teach yourself not to think too much about those your movement killed and maimed, you have also learned not to see things as they look and feel for the victims of your comrades’ unfortunate “mistakes” and “errors”.