You’d wonder what Pearse Doherty was on yesterday in the Dáil when his colleague and leader of the opposition treated their party’s liabilities around McMonagle with lurid insouciance, as it becomes ever obvious the whole party needs to go into rehab.
Political parties are a particular type of voluntary organisation which plays an important role in gauging public sentiment and mediating between ordinary people and ultimately the institutions of government be in opposition or as party of the executive.
They are also responsible for ensuring that our democratic politics are conducted within certain guardrails that preserve decency and fair conduct in exchanges between people who have quite different outlooks and world views and more widely.
In NI more revelations came, this time from the News Letter, after the Michael McMonagle affair was apparently capped by Michelle O’Neill’s appearance in Stormont on Monday. More names in the frame of those who should have known about him.
He was in the employ of Sinn Féin MLA Jemma Dolan when he was suspended, the Assembly pass he used to get in and out of Stormont was sponsored by another MLA, Phillip McGuigan. It is unclear whether Ms Dolan was informed by her own party.
The News Letter also writes that “nobody informed the assembly authorities of the suspension – or indeed sought to revoke his access to Parliament Buildings”. It notes that McMonagle was employed directly by the First Minister for two months in 2020.
Despite attempts at misdirection from some members of the press who should know better this is not about shifting blame from McMonagle to two female party leaders, but an examination of how fit for purpose Sinn Féin’s policy on child protection is.
Michelle O’Neill provided an acid test at the beginning of her Assembly questions on Tuesday saying they had a child protection policy and human resources handbook. As noted previously this relates to prior assurances that such policies were in place.
Yet any internal policy, however professionally written, is a dry exercise in pointlessness if no one actually uses them, as appears to be the case here with McMonagle. People will ask how did a Sinn Féin MLA get him a pass after his suspension?
The analogy with a Catholic Church that destroyed the social and moral standing with its own adherents by failing the openness if not the total transparency test. Even Conor Murphy has previously noted how failure to act created mayhem afterwards.
Yet Murphy and most of the rest of Sinn Féín’s front bench continue to refuse the comparison when it comes to the culture of secrecy in their own backyard. It begs the question of what else is happening inside Sinn Féin right now that it is ignoring?
Ask yourself to what degree did anyone of senior rank in Sinn Féin pay any attention to those policies when a matter of such grave importance as child protection could be handled in such a way that neither President or Vice President were consulted?
The advice from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) is clear that “to do safeguarding well takes a whole organisation”, and it goes on to highlight:
…as a human resources (HR) director or manager, you and your team must play a leading role in establishing safeguarding throughout the organisations through its work in several areas.
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Strategy and policy development.
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Promoting a safeguarding culture.
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Supporting and monitoring internal and external reporting processes.
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Recruiting staff, volunteers and trustees.
Where was the strategy? How does palming responsibility for such onerous duties to a party official rather than a senior overseeing party officer, as recommended, promote a safeguarding culture? Indeed the message it is sending is the opposite.
From its public messaging Sinn Féin tells us that in this case, most of the party was not involved in regulating how it handles its safeguarding duties towards any children it may have come into contact with, or any partner organisations it works with.
What’s been revealed over the last week or so is that whatever is presented to the outside world Sinn Féin is a hollow shell in which nothing is as it seems. In order to survive this story three people have been thrown under the proverbial bus.
If registered with the CIPD whoever the HR officer was will likely never work in that sector again, even if it is barely credible that their own professional code would have allowed them to believe it was their role to take any such an arbitrary decision.
The irony is that up to the point it suspended McMonagle Sinn Féin behaved in a perfectly ethical way. Given the previous four cases (and goodness knows what else may be in the pipeline), there was clearly a bout of moral panic. And it hid the dirty linen.
As is clear from the interchange in the Dáil yesterday it continues to deflect attention from its own shortcomings in this regard onto others rather than taking ownership of its own serious issues in this regard. As they’ve found in the north, it won’t work.
Worse, it sends out a self harming message that the party is a safe haven for behaviour no one wants their party embroiled in. If the party cannot investigate itself it may fall to parliament to call a commission of investigation to turn over some heavy rocks.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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