Shane Ross: Mary Lou’s obsessive power play was forged among IRA dead in Ulster

Mary Lou had spent much more of the previous decade than is realized energetically, but quietly, compensating for her lack of an IRA pedigree.

Her preparation for the leadership was long and meticulously measured. Her high- profile part in the funeral of Joe Cahill in 2004 and her prominent part in the last journey of Martin McGuinness in 2017 were not unique events. Her willingness to accompany former IRA chief Brian Keenan to commemorate Nazi sympathizer Sean Russell in 2003 was in the same vein, an early signal to the hardest of the hard men that she too was a ‘good republican’.

Her high-profile appearance at all three events was part of a far-sighted process to win the leadership in the killing fields, in the cemeteries of Northern Ireland and at the commemorations of those she unfailingly recognised as the ‘patriot dead’. Some of the veterans had originally been sceptical of her, suggesting that the Mary Lou story simply didn’t add up.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

In May 2008 Keenan himself died. Once again, the cemetery beckoned. At his funeral, amid all the usual paramilitary trappings, Mary Lou popped up carrying the coffin. She never missed an opportunity. Alongside her on that day, helping to shoulder Keenan’s casket wrapped in the tricolour was Martina Anderson, the veteran ex-prisoner.

Beside them marched men in black berets. The last ‘lift’ of Keenan’s coffin was made by the four fearsome members of the Balcombe Street gang. Speeches were given by Former Army Council member Armagh’s Sean (‘the Surgeon’) Hughes and by Adams himself.

Mary Lou’s appetite for Northern Ireland visits was consistent throughout her years as Adams’ devoted disciple, but it intensified as the leader’s departure loomed. It was not confined to funerals, but extended to party events, debates and endless commemorations, all offering her frequent opportunities to press the flesh of those bereaved by the death of an IRA volunteer.

In 2013 she gave the keynote speech at the Belfast commemorations. Speaking in yet another cemetery, Belfast’s Milltown, she reminded her audience of ‘RUC brutality’ of ‘internment’ and paid tribute to the IRA’s courage. In June later that year she was at the Crossmaglen Rangers Gaelic Athletic Club in south Armagh, the heart of militant republicanism, participating in a debate on a united Ireland.

Mary Lou never lost sight of the families and followers of the republican dead. After she was elected to Dail Eireann she appears to have stepped up a gear. In 2014 she was the keynote speaker at Derry’s commemoration in the city’s republican plot, an occasion that allowed her to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Cumann of mBan, this time in Derry City Cemetery. One hundred and twenty women,many former prisoners, led the parade.

Once again, tailoring her speech to her audience, Mary Lou lashed out against unionists and the British government. As always, she paid tribute to all republicans who had died, including the recent IRA fighters. On 22 October 2015, she ventured into Armagh, where she delivered the Peter Corrigan political lecture on ‘One Hundred Years of the Republican Struggle’. Corrigan was a Sinn Fein election worker murdered in the street by an Ulster Volunteer Force death squad in 1982.

As the 2016 general election approached and it became obvious that there would be no immediate Sinn Fein leadership change, Mary Lou’s main focus switched temporarily to republicans from her home base, fulfilling remembrance commitments in various southern locations, including Dublin, Donegal and the annual Bodenstown commemoration. On one rare occasion in 2013 she was even accompanied to Bodenstown by her husband Martin and both her children.

In December 2015 Mary Lou chaired a night of ‘celebration and remembrance’ at Dublin’s Gresham Hotel for Jim Monaghan, a friend of Adams and one of the infamous Columbia Three who was convicted of training FARC guerillas and travelling to the country on a false passport. Monaghan was on the run after fleeing Columbia.

In his memoir, Up Like a Bird, IRA man Brendan Hughes describes Monaghan as ‘the best engineer the IRA ever had’. Nicknamed ‘Mortar’ Monaghan for his explosive expertise, he had skipped bail in Columbia and dodged a seventeen- year custodial sentence. Mary Lou’s decision to take the chair for the evening will have further raised her stock among the paramilitary wing. Among those in attendance were Bridget Rose Dugdale, the British heiress-turned IRA bomber.

After Sinn Fein’s disappointing February 2016 general election result Adams’ retirement was only a matter of time. Mary Lou further increased her efforts to ensure the approval of his hardcore Northern base. She was working for the ultimate prize with Adams’s collusion, but she still needed to complete all the spadework for him to be certain that Northern republicans would accept her bona fide republican convictions and confirm his plans for her coronation as his successor.

The general election in February 2016 was followed by a Northern Assembly election in May. Mary Lou took full advantage of the opportunity to make multiple appearances in the North. She attended campaign launches in Gerry Adams’ West Belfast constituency and in Martin McGuinness’s Derry Foyle patch. She busted a gut for the Sinn Fein candidates, building up further goodwill from Sinn Fein sceptics in the North.

After the 2016 election campaign she was back in the cemeteries. On 29 July she spoke at a commemoration in South Armagh for republican heroes Peadar McElvanna and Michael McVerry. McElvanna had died in 1979 when preparing an IRA ambush of the British Army Royal Green Jackets in Keady, County Armagh. A year earlier he had been unsuccessfully prosecuted on a charge of gunning down an off-duty British soldier on his wedding day.

Lieutenant Gary Cass was shot while walking away from the Trim, County Meath, church with his bride. Cass somehow survived. Acquitted alongside McElvanna was Dessie O’ Hare, known as ‘the Border Fox,’ a man later convicted for many of the most grisly acts of the Troubles. Michael McVerry, the other man being revered by Mary Lou on that day, was a former officer commanding the First Battalion of the IRA south Armagh Brigade. McVerry died during an IRA attack on Keady barracks in 1973.

Mary Lou was back in the fertile, leadership campaigning territory of south Armagh in October, this time to mark the death of Maire Drumm, the militant republican hero murdered by loyalists while in Belfast’s Mater Hospital in 1976. Mary Lou led local representatives and family members in a wreath-laying ceremony.

Next stop was the Derry Volunteers dinner the following month, then the funeral of Martin McGuinness in March 2017, followed a month later by a separate ceremony in Derry City Cemetery for the Easter 1916 commemoration, where a new headstone was unveiled at McGuinness’s grave.

She even managed to further claim the McGuinness mantle in August 2017 when, at the Belfast Feile an Phobail, she shared a panel with Belfast republican Danny Morrison and former MLA Mitchel McLaughlin on the topic: ‘An Outstanding Leader: The Life and Times of Martin McGuinness.’

As Adams prepared to announce his departure date, no stone was being left unturned in Mary Lou’s pursuit of the prize. She had been on the trail between Belfast, south Armagh and Derry, but she was not going to neglect any other former IRA strongholds.

In September she headed for the Tyrone Volunteers annual commemoration in Strabane. She addressed the crowd that had assembled in the Diamond in Lifford, Co Donegal, before parading across the bridge straddling the border to the republican plot in Strabane cemetery. Fifty-nine IRA activists from County Tyrone had died in the Troubles. The Tyrone Brigade was notorious for its sectarian nature. It was responsible for many merciless deaths.

Victims’ groups were outraged. Kenny Donaldson, a prominent victims’ campaigner for the South East Fermanagh Foundation, was furious, asserting that Mary Lou “had associated herself with a number of commemorative events to those within the republican movement, many of whom were serial killers who murdered their own neighbours because of sectarian and ethnic-motivated hatreds.” Donaldson added: “This is certainly the case with a considerable number of those commemorated at the Strabane event where she acted as keynote speaker.”

Mary Lou ploughed on. She was completing a long campaign. She was ticking boxes, moving from dinners to cemeteries, to memorials to parades, even to canvassing on nationalist doors. The survivors, the dead IRA men’s successors, and the bereaved relatives of the ‘patriot dead’ would remember her eulogies.

She had probably covered every IRA brigade that had lost members in the Troubles. She had done her master’s bidding. Many of her activities were largely unknown and deliberately unpublicised in the less republican South, but targeted at the eyes and ears of those who undoubtedly held sway over the choice of Sinn Fein’s next leader.

The fifteen-year campaign was almost over.

Even as Mary Lou attended the commemoration for the IRA’s Tyrone brigade in September Gerry Adams was putting the finishing touches to his exit plan.

Extract from chapter 9: ‘Playing the Cemetery Game’, MARY LOU MCDONALD: A Republican Riddle by Shane Ross. Published by Atlantic Books