A general election today would see Mary Lou McDonald elected taoiseach by Dáil Eireann if polls were a more perfect mirror of reality. So, her views on the structure of our democracy, on our economy and society, on the future she sees for our island, and on the organisation she leads are very important to understand.

So are McDonald’s policies. For several years I have argued Sinn Fein’s policies need to be scrutinised very carefully, not out of any fear that they were in some sense damaging to the economy, or to the society, but because as a credible political force with a possibility of actually implementing these policies when in power, it behoves all citizens to ask their prospective leaders what they might do in office, how they might do it, who might benefit from those policies, and who might lose out. That’s what this discussion was about.

We cover a lot of ground. We begin with the organisation of Sinn Féin. It is a fast-growing and all-island entity, with representations in several parliaments. The organisational complexity of all of this is clear. Leading groups of political activists and managing the inevitable internal conflicts that arise through any dialogue are part and parcel of any party’s work, but McDonald’s challenge is in managing the dual constraints of Sinn Féin’s legendary party discipline and its rapid growth in recent years. Her answers here are articulate, reflective, and honest. She wants to place the citizen firmly at the centre of the state, and organise the economy around principles of fairness.

We spoke about the anxiety of our age: housing. The President of Sinn Féin makes a bold prediction, that housing will be the dominant issue in the next election as it was in the election of 2020. I asked a question about distributional dynamics. Sinn Féin see the route to more housing through publicly-funded and provided housing. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil prefer a market-led approach. More housing in an area might well depress the price of housing in that area, leading to a conflict between those that already have housing, whose interests are not served by more near them, and those who do not. McDonald is thoughtful on this question and rightly takes me to task for the reductionistic thinking surrounding the question—it is a more complex issue, after all—but I do wonder whether, in an era of increasing political polarisation, will we see ‘Sinn Féin will put you into negative equity’ attack ads playing during the next election.

McDonald makes a very astute comment: “Everything is dictated by the dynamics of how politics operates”. She references the speed at which measures were introduced in the public interest by the caretaker government to cope with the crisis, and talks about how the solutions to some policy problems are simply ‘known’, because that’s how problems have been approached before. Later on in the interview, the problem of the political communications in complex situations references this issue.

I’m struck by how straightforward McDonald is in many of her answers. For example, she’s clear the specifics of how a reunification might work in terms of the integration of public services North and South is a job of work yet to be done. There are exemplars in other countries, South Korea and Germany being two, but it’s clear the eventual form of a reunified country’s services, how people would get their pensions and access health care, is still an open question conditional on the shape of the political settlement.

I enjoyed the exchange immensely, I hope you do too.

*****

Stephen Kinsella: It has been 1080 days since you assumed office as president of Sinn Féin. What have you learned about managing the organisation as opposed to the politics in that time?

Mary Lou McDonald: Well, it seems like a really long time when you put it like in days, 1080 days, and I have to say without sounding too cliched, but every day has been a learning day. I mean, the organisation itself is very big. We’re a national organisation. We’re not like other political parties, which I would describe as regional outfits. We span the 32 counties. We’re elected and present in the Dáil and the Seanad, to the assembly, the executive and councils right across the island, and the European Parliament. We have elected members to Westminster, but of course, we’re an abstentionist party. So, it’s organisationally quite complex. And that’s before you get into the political dynamic that is set by managing the day-to-day bread and butter political realities into jurisdictions.

And of course, you overlay the whole thing with the fact that Sinn Féin is a party that’s about fundamental change and transition and a peaceful, democratic, orderly constitutional change. So yes, it’s a balancing act. It has been certainly a series of lessons to me in terms of even my own time management and how you may try to divide yourself into two or three to get to all of the tasks that you need to cover.

And perhaps above all else, I think I have learned the lesson of good, smart delegation and building very strong teams across the organisation in everything from internal processes, procedures and management to communications – all of that. A political party, particularly one as large as ours, in many ways, it’s no different to the running and management of any other large, complex organisation. We produce ideas and platforms and manifestos and election campaigns and activism, whereas others might provide another service are produce another project, but the principles are the same.

SK: Have you had to build in new layers of the organisation? Because of course, since you’ve taken over, it’s become much larger. I mean just in terms of elected representatives and onboarding new TDs and senators, etc, but just the sheer size of the organisation, have you had to introduce new layers or is it simply a question of adding more work to the shoulders of the existing teams?

MLMcD: One of the things we transitioned, I suppose, particularly in the 26 counties, is from being a small party to a slightly bigger party to a big party in a relatively short timeline. And there were moments when as an organisation, we struggled with managing that. That is the honest truth, because when you have, we have more than 17,000 members now and there’s a whole management task around that in itself, that’s before you get to elected representatives and the party bureaucracy.

So yes, we did of course have to change our systems north and south to make sure that we were knitting all of the essential tasks together, that we weren’t creating silos in the organisation where you had reservoirs of great ideas and different activities, but that weren’t kind of synergising or adding up to kind of a greater sum of activities.

And by the way, I think we’ll always be doing that. One of the things about political organisation is that it’s never an endpoint. It’s always about the process and it’s about becoming better and smarter in what you do. And sometimes that better and smarter is actually not dreaming up new-fangled approaches or systems, but actually going back to basics and things that actually work. So, for people involved in activism, for anybody who chooses to join Sinn Féin, they’re joining because they are activists and not because they’re delighted with the status quo, but because they can see a bigger horizon and bigger opportunities and that whole politics of change that we discussed in the course of the last election.

So, your own organisation has to be geared towards that and has to respond to it because activists have to be active and political organisations have to be political. They have to engender debate and sometimes dissent and differences of opinion. When the organisation is developing, you have to figure out how to accommodate kind of more traditional old-style activists or members and support and then how to diversify and bring new ideas and new energy and new activists with you.

So, it’s an interesting and very often a very challenging kind of balancing act.

SK: I can imagine no political party is a monolith. You must have differing interest groups. You have people who are socially liberal and people who are socially conservative. You’ve anti-system political activists, everything under the same banner. How do you as a group resolve those issues where you will have constitutional republicans. You will have people who are very socially liberal and you will also have people who are socially conservative.

What does the dialogue process look like within the organisation that says, actually, no, we’re going to go for a more socially liberal outcome to take one or a socially conservative outcome? Or what’s the process that you go through to reach that outcome?

MLMcD: Just bear in mind, the republican movement generally has always been a coalition of different tendencies and interests. You had that same dynamic of social liberals, others that were more conservative, language activists, feminists, different tendencies. And Sinn Féin is no different now than back a century ago because you do have that mix. So how do you mediate that, how do you arrive at a conclusion when you have all of that? Well, it’s through a process of dialogue and debate. And that’s only possible because of the thing that we all share and the position that we all share is a commitment to Irish unity, a belief in national self-determination, a belief in the power of democracy for our whole island, and our belief that a reunified Ireland is the best plan for every citizen who lives on the island.

And then secondly, the compact between all of us, that the collective wisdom, in the end, prevails over the individual position, although you will always state that and drive that in a way that’s energetic, but when you’re in a political party, it’s a big difference between being a member of a party, any party in fact, and being an independent.

You didn’t have to sublimate some of yourself and your own views and accept that the collective view, after debate and discussion, is the view that you will accept because you have to have the democratic process. So, challenging for people and particularly when people feel very passionately on any given issue – I mean, we had an experience of it around the campaign to repeal the 8th. And there were very strong views. And by the way, all of them legitimate views and sincerity and deeply held.

But the party navigated its way through that particular issue. And that’s the stuff of fairly frank conversations. Sometimes, the best possible outcome is always that each person retains the integrity of their own personal view and position whilst accepting that the political priority, for the movement to advance, that the collective view needs to prevail in the end.

And I mean our annual Ard Fheis, our annual tradition is different from other political parties in that it’s not just a set piece of speeches, although of course, we do that as well. It is the place where policy is made and changed and shaped, and we rely hugely on our delegates and we’re always trying to encourage more and more political discussion within the grassroots. So, we don’t have a passive organisation that simply follows whatever a leadership group might say. It’s much healthier to have the dynamic and sometimes the very strong challenge to what you’re setting out or views that are taking, that’s a far healthier state of affairs.

The economics of reunification

SK: If the polls are to be believed, if there was an election tomorrow, you’d be taoiseach. What do you hope would be structurally different in an Ireland led by a Sinn Féin government for five years – of either a majority or single-party government for Sinn Féin?

MLMcD: I think that’s the great challenge, and I think that’s a very good question, because the difference in governance can’t simply be around different policy approaches, although I could list them and I think some of them are very obvious, whether it’s in the area of housing or the development of public health care.

But the bigger politics, the bigger structural issues are, on the one hand, constitutional. That journey towards reunification and that appetite for the conversation about the new Ireland is well established. It’s happening. It’s very unfortunate that the current administration chooses to bury their heads in the sand. I’ve told them publicly and privately that that’s a mistake. I genuinely believe they’re making a mistake. That process needs to be managed because that will represent the most profound structural change for our island. And it needs to be mediated and planned and discussed because it has to be achieved democratically and peacefully. So that’s the first thing.

The second dynamic allied to that is the dynamic of equality, not simply as a rhetorical stance or a kind of shared, lofty ambition, but as something that actually drives the process of policy making, but also the process of governance. I believe that we’ve had for a long time almost an absentee state and I suppose the human embodiment of that state is those that are in charge for a very, very long time. And I think that needs to change and it needs to change dramatically. We need governments and a state that is engaged and that is prepared to intervene and to do its job in terms of vindicating the rights and aspirations of citizens, but also in mediating the material conditions in which people live. And I think that would be the big difference with the Sinn Féin administration and allied to that, that sense of connection between government and those that are governed.

I hear people talk from time to time about this thing called the social contract, which of course, is very important. That there is an understanding between all of us citizens and those of us generally and those of us, the citizens who are in positions of power and governance. There has to be an understanding of that relationship and the dynamics of it. I’ve seen now for a long time the fact for very, very many people, they have drifted far away from the political system and they nearly regard politics as something that is done to you.

I think that’s a terrible state of affairs. So, we need to fix that as well. The citizen needs to be front and centre in the operation of the state and then decent work and the rights of working people need to be front and centre in the economy. And I think those changes would be the most profound structural changes in Irish political life because everything really in the end is dictated by the dynamic of how politics operates. It’s not just the stance that different administrations might take on individual policy measures, but it’s the overall approach that determines whether or not you actually have a politics that is connected to citizens, or one that’s adrift from them. And I think for a long time the direction has been drift.

SK: That’s a very considered response. It makes me think of two things. The first is, in the actual mechanics of reunification, you’re going to need public sector reform North and South.

MLMcD: Yes.

Policy reforms and the sleeping state

SK: You mentioned the idea of a sleeping state. What kinds of public sector reforms would you like to see, or would you mandate as taoiseach – would you simply order – north and south over that five years?

MLMcD: Well let me tell you, you cannot govern by decree, that’s for sure. Nor would I intend to. I would not be so foolish or indeed so arrogant as to attempt. But I think in the recent weeks, we’ve seen where governance by decree has faltered and failed. All of this is about engagement. I think it’s fair to say that within the public sector, north and south, you have massive reservoirs of talent and expertise and experience. But I think it’s also fair to say that we have seen moments of confusion, moments sometimes of inertia, and that needs to be tackled.

And I think the tackling of that has to start with those who are in charge. So, I think it starts with politics, the politicians and political leadership. I was very struck in the course of this pandemic, but perhaps particularly at the beginning, how quickly big things happened. So just to take, for example, the Department of Social Protection and the way in which there was such a quick response to the fact that the economy was put to sleep, mass numbers of people out of work, reliant on the system, on the welfare state and how that kicked in.

I mean, that’s in very marked contrast to the very snail’s pace and the very slow pace, very often of introducing or delivering even some very straightforward reforms. And what marked that out as different and why that happened is because the political leadership, the heat was on, decisions had to be delivered, public opinion and people’s economic well-being and survival was not going to tolerate dilly dallying or delay. And so things happened. So I think that sense of political direction and push is absolutely essential.

If there is slowness and inefficiencies in the public system, the public sector, and the civil service that’s on us, it’s on the political class in the first instance.

“What does social welfare provision look like in a new Ireland, a united Ireland? Question, discuss.”

SK: But even if the public sectors worked at perfect efficiency north and south, you would still need to go through some process to integrate them. I’m just wondering what are you considering in terms of the actual policy reforms? I don’t simply mean in terms of the health system. I mean in terms of radiology. So really just delivering various basic services for people. How do you think about starting those conversations about integrating services just for the average person? Social protection is a perfect example. In a reunified Ireland, people would get a social welfare payment or a pension from a unified office.

How do you think about actually going about pulling those systems together regardless of their levels of efficiency?

MLMcD: Yeah, and so that is the exact type of work and preparation that I believe needs to commence now. That’s why we’ve argued for a forum or an assembly, we don’t care what it’s called, but a space in which that very deliberate planning and preparation can happen. Because those are the questions, those are the legitimate questions that will be posed as and when we move towards referendums on unity north and south. So to take the health service, for example, one of the first actions of the new executive, once we got it back up and running more than a year ago now, was to award a pay increase to nursing staff because they had lost their equivalence with workers in Britain.

But what was interesting was in the course of my conversation with many of those workers when that dispute was underway and I said to them, “what’s happening and what’s going on,” you found that the same problems besetting the system here in the south were evident in the north. So, overreliance on agency workers, problems with waiting lists, capacity, staffing, all of that. So the challenge is north and south and I’m using health as an example, are not hugely dissimilar. What we need to figure out is how you connect, and not just connect two old systems, but how you transform that into a new system and in the case of health, we’re looking at an Irish national health service. That’s a very ambitious thing to aim for. But it’s what we need. We need a national public health service. We’ve Sláintecare in the South, we have the Bengoa set of reforms in the north that to some extent give us platforms to begin that conversation, if you like.

But the only way that I or you or anybody else is going to know the actual answer to the very good question that you put to me is when we sit down and when we actually, whether it’s radiography, general practice, whatever the case might be, that we actually sieve our way through each element of that system and figure out what works best for us on the island as a whole.

Sometimes public servants and civil servants get anxious when they hear about north south, delivering a new system. Does this mean I’m out of a job? What’s that going to mean? I would just remind people that in many of the services and systems that we have north and south, we’re not suffering from overcapacity or overstaffing. In many cases, we’re understaffed and we’re under capacity. So reform, it’s not just a simple equation of reform equals job losses, or reform equals reduction. In certain pieces, it may do. But overall, it would be much more varied than that.

And these are important conversations that need to happen. I know within our own party, in an area like health or transport or any of the other areas, we foster north-south conversations, and I’m always saying to our people, you need to know what’s going on north and south. You always need to have a national perspective. And it’s challenging sometimes to keep abreast of all of that and to keep that working, when you’re working on two jurisdictions and for the island as a whole, that dilemma’s even bigger, north to south. And we’re only going to resolve that by actually having that space where we start to plan now.

So that’s the question. What does social welfare provision look like in a new Ireland, a united Ireland? Question, discuss. And Sinn Fein isn’t going to be handing this down on tablets of stone Stephen, we will bring our ideas, we’ll bring our ideas to the table. But I am acutely conscious that reunifying the island and a new Ireland is everybody’s business. It’s everybody’s job. And it’s not like just a Sinn Fein pet project, although we’ll lead from the front on it I believe.

Equality and the tax system

SK: The other really interesting point you made was around equality. If I think about equality as a sort of a government principle, cherish everyone equally, and then I think about what JK Galbraith called the major, he has a beautiful quote. “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

I really like that quote. And you mentioned the discussion before Covid, the election that you fought in February of last year. I think it came down to many, there were many discussions, but it really came down to one policy, which was housing. And I think housing for me in this country is a distributional variable. You either own it or you don’t. And people who want to access housing of all kinds, many people want to own their own homes. But access to housing is a key policy issue. Sinn Féin is very good on its housing policy, and I’ve had many occasions to praise the development of that policy in the past. But it does produce a distributional problem, right? If I’m a voter and I own my home and we have the construction of 100 houses near me, that lowers the value of my home, which is my major source of equity. So is there a way in which striving for equality, which I agree with, and housing access, which obviously I agree with, puts your policies into direct confrontation with the policies of other people who will support those who own the homes? So are you going to set up a dynamic whereby the housing policy for one group is to effectively keep housing prices higher and the Sinn Féin group is to lower them? Is there a possibility of a distributional conflict coming from that.

MLMcD: Only if you think of human beings and human society in very linear terms and in very transactional terms. So that’s not how human beings or life works fortunately. Because those very persons who own their own (homes), who may say well, in terms of my pocket or my bank balance, it is in my interest that we have price inflation, value inflation. You will find that huge numbers of them are also parents or grandparents who fret and worry at the fact that their young person, their young adults can’t leave. So you’re in this very expensive home and Johnny is still with you there into his 30s. That’s not going to lighten anybody’s mood, let’s be honest.

So we’re much more interconnected as human communities than that. I mean, Galbraith talked about private wealth and public squalor, didn’t he? And kind of making the, having an appreciation of the shared community life, because that’s actually what societies are about. Now don’t get me wrong, each of us in our own way, for our own families and ourselves, you make your way in the world and you worry about your domestic circumstances and getting by of course. And there are those of us who wish, whose sole ambition in life is to be outrageously wealthy and they make their life about that. And there are others who will struggle and really, really struggle hard. So you have to deal with your own story. But there is the wider societal conversation. And I would say to you that it is in everybody’s interests, that you live in a decent society. It’s in everybody’s interest, the fundamental right to shelter is understood by all of us and protected.

And I remember, Stephen, times when people like me, people like those on the left who talked about housing as a right and that it should be an explicit, enumerated right within our constitutional law and others would have thrown their eyes to heaven saying there’s Sinn Féin or there is the left off again. And then the coronavirus came along. And with the coronavirus, we discover that not alone is the right to shelter a matter of civil rights for your own human comfort and dignity. It’s also connected with public health and public safety because it is your sanctuary and your shelter. So nobody’s throwing their eyes to heaven now when housing as a right is expressed, and rightly so. I think the last election for sure, housing was front and centre. Can I make a prediction? In the next election, housing will still be front and centre because what we have seen again is now an administration between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, they’ve kissed and made up, they’re in government together. And they’re making the same mistakes all over again.

Light touch approach for international, for investment funds, for vulture funds, giving them every advantage, the advantageous position within the housing market, coming up with a cock and bull shared equity loan scheme that was written, literally written by property developers. Co-Living, I mean, God almighty, who comes up with that when we’re in the grips of a global pandemic and still our people wait, either on social housing lists or they’re still at home in their mummy’s box room with no sign of them moving on, or they’re in rental accommodation that costs the earth and the harshest crawlspaces and as to whether they can make their rent.

I mean, it doesn’t matter in the end if you live in an incredible house and your equity is soaring, if you live in your incredible house, but you are living in the equivalent of a social slum when it comes to housing policy, that’s no good. That’s bad for society and it’s also bad for the economy because it’s not sustainable. People won’t tolerate that forever. By the way, nor should they.

“You’d be absolutely naive to imagine that you can raise all of the revenues that you’re required just from one small section of the population. We’re not actually making that case.”

SK: I agree. My question is more about the fact that if you look at the way our politics is developing, it’s becoming more polar. Those polar elements, Sinn Féin is obviously one of them. If you can describe their policies very simply, one is more housing produced by the public sector and the other is more housing produced by the private sector. And one of those approaches keeps house prices relatively high. And the other does not. So it engenders a distributional conversation about who benefits and who does not. Now of course, we’re not going to work this out right now.

But it is interesting, I think before this, before Covid, we would have described the Sinn Fein approach, and I’ve read all of the manifestos for the last 10 years very, very carefully, and I produced a report on all of them each year and each year, I continue to be impressed by them and their depth and the amount of research that goes into them. A lot of thought, but I think I’m confident in saying that the approach of the  policies that the party is pursuing is, I would describe them as a maximalist state, it’s free childcare, more housing, national health service, all of which is absolutely coherent with the views and values of the party. The question is, what is the level of taxable expenditure that has to rise to meet that and where does that come from? So I’ve done a fair bit of it, essentially it’s not far off a Nordic states in terms of the level of provision.

The issue is that if you look at the direct and indirect taxation, you add those two things together and then you break the income amounts or income levels of the household into five boxes. The top two boxes pay above Nordic levels of tax and the bottom two boxes pay below, and not just income tax, VAT and everything else.

How does Sinn Fein argue for an expansion of the taxable base? Now obviously, there’s a proposal to tax intangibles. There’s a proposal for a wealth tax. There’s a proposal to alter the property tax, although I believe that’s downward. But fundamentally, we’re talking about more people paying more tax. How do you think about having that conversation with people? Because I don’t think we’re going to get to a situation where we have more people paying more tax and happily doing so unless they’re receiving public services, which brings me back to that question of public sector reform. I think if people know that they’re getting a good deal, they’re quite happy to pay for it. So how do you think about A, the maximalist state post Covid, and B, the idea of the kinds of tax expenditures that you’d expect to see under a Sinn Féin government over let’s say a five year period, because nothing ever happens that quickly in tax policy.

MLMcD: So just to your first point to that kind of distributional question, this creates that kind of sense of polarisation, that dynamic that I would describe sort of left to right in Irish political life. That’s true. I mean, let me acknowledge that. I also think that’s healthy because ultimately we have to make choices here. We’re not some kind of passive observers of all of this. We’re active agents of the society and the economy in which we live. So we have to deploy that and leverage it in the way that we believe is best for the common and the collective good. There is a report, I believe, out from the Institute of Chartered Surveyors, which demonstrates again, that housing can be delivered more efficiently, more cost-effectively and by the public sector rather than private. But that’s going to be an ongoing debate. And the position that you adopt in that will be shaped by your world view, by your position of principle, by your philosophy of things like what’s right and what’s wrong, who benefits and to what extent. So that’s very much in the mix.

On the issue of taxes and the burden of tax and where it falls, I mean, you’d be absolutely naive to imagine that you can raise all of the revenues that you require just from one small section of the population. We’re not actually making that case. And you’ve studied our manifestos, you know in the last one, the income tax proposed was about 20 per cent of the tax take that we envisaged.

But let me turn the equation a little bit. You see, we have an economy that is largely and increasingly based on low pay, on the gig-economy it’s politely called, very insecure work. What we want to do is to turn that ship so that you have secure, decent, and well-paid work. I don’t want low pay workers to languish forever as low pay workers. I mean, what’s the point in that? The whole point of identifying low pay as a political and social issue is that you resolve the issue of low pay so that you have people who are on good pay. I mean that’s the logic of what we’re doing here. There’s no point to them having commissions and policy addressed at low pay that’s not lifting people from poverty and low pay. And obviously, as you progress and the stronger position you are in financially, well then you’re in a position to be a net contributor in income tax terms. But you can’t tax people who are literally just scratching by, what’s the sense in that? You dig the poverty hole more deeply for them.

What we try to do in our taxation proposals is to bring the value of fairness, just simple fairness and capacity to pay, capacity to contribute to the table. So it’s actually, yes, it’s born from belief and principle and a sense of fairness. But it’s also pretty pragmatic as well, because we know that to get beyond kind of tinkering at the edges of our society to deliver big transformation, which is what we want to do. And by the way, what we’re suggesting is as you say, in housing and health, none of these are luxury items, these are very basics of a good life. But we also know that to do that, you have to pay for things. So sometimes our critics go on about money trees, and I can assure you I’ve no money tree in my garden in Cabra, I don’t know anyone who does. We’re grown ups, so we know that things need to be paid for. And we’re also grown ups that know that you can’t take things from people that they simply don’t have and that you need to keep buoyancy in the domestic economy. It’s a no-win scenario if people don’t have disposable income. So those are the kind of things that inform our approach. I just wanted to say very clearly that we don’t regard taxation as some kind of methods of vengeance, you know what I mean?

That’s not the idea here. The idea here is that we have to raise what we need to build the society that all of us wish to live in. And then that of course, in the way that you see in Nordic countries, spurs on further social improvement, improvement in people’s standard of living, and that cuts right across society. The rich and the better off benefit from that too. That’s a good scenario for everybody.

The hard choices of politics

SK: Hard choices. In government, you’re going to have to make hard choices and I would like to know what your approach to making a hard choice is. Just right now, just as we’re recording this, the government has a hard choice to make. Do they keep schools closed or do they open them up? There’s no good answer there. They’re both bad choices in a certain way, in a certain light. I don’t necessarily want you to comment on that one particularly. I just want to know how you’d approach that. What criteria would you use as taoiseach to make a really hard choice, close the economy down, close schools, open this up, take the risk of this happening. How do you think about hard choices where there’s no good answer, there’s no perfect outcome. It’s just you’re searching for the least worst. As a leader, how do you think about that?

MLMcD: Well, I personally think the first thing for me that is essential in circumstances like that is to have the full information, so you can’t make any choice, much less serious, hard choices with long term consequences if you’re flying blind. So anybody in government, particularly anybody who’s leading government, has to have full information and you have to be able to rely on the information that you’re getting. That is it full and complete, and therefore you have to interrogate it very carefully. So that would be my forum anyway, if I’m making a decision pretty much on anything, I will go over and over and if I need information, I expect to get all of the information. I don’t appreciate being left in the dark on things.

Secondly, you need to consult and you need to collaborate, because on any decision that you are going to make on any aspect of Irish life, there are people outside of your direct orbit who live and breathe and who have expertise and wisdom that you are very, very foolish not to avail of.

And then you need a plan and you need to understand that you have to make a call on things. In any form of public life, and believe it or not, politics, even though it’s about elections, it’s not actually a popularity contest. Lots of times you are always going to have people who will critique and sometimes rightly so. I’m not complaining about that. That’s how this works.

But you’re never going to make the right calls or be decisive in any way, if what’s bothering you is kind of tangential things like what will the reaction be or how it is criticised. So in a way, you need to immunise yourself from that piece, but you have to absolutely keep up direct engagement with people. There is rarely a social dilemma or an issue that will come across your desk in politics that somebody somewhere, communities of people even, haven’t thought about, worried about, deliberated about, where there are no ideas. It’s very rare that the coverage is fair and that Irish society and all of us, that nobody has ideas that can be of assistance to you.

“There’s nobody and no political party on earth that’s always right.”

So I think a wise person, a wise taoiseach, avails of that. I think a foolhardy taoiseach locks themselves away in an ivory tower and becomes insular and isolated in their decision making. I think that’s a mistake. But ultimately, you’re the taoiseach, you’re in charge, and you have to make the calls.

SK: Okay. I’m struck by the tension that you’ve described there. Listen to everybody, but ultimately, you’re the one who makes the call. People will come at you with very different approaches. Open the schools, close the schools, do X, don’t do X. You have to make a call. One of the things I’ve been very surprised by, particularly after the economic crisis, is that we very rarely see ministers arguing for, not arguing for the decisions, but actually taking you through how they made the decision. It’s very rare that they say well, I could have chosen to levy a fine on this bank, but I didn’t. And the reason that I didn’t is X, Y, Z. And I could have chosen to, I don’t know, increase early childhood education. But there were three or four different things happening and ultimately I just couldn’t do it.

I find the politics is often messaged in very simple language and very linear terms. The Minister for Health got himself into awful trouble when he tried to describe the concept of risk using a trampoline. And it was, was it a perfect example? No. But what he was talking about was taking a risk. I mean, I think he was absolutely right to make that point. You’re taking a risk. Things could go right. Things can go wrong.

But yeah, he probably shouldn’t have compared a trampoline to a pandemic. But how do you think about communicating with the public in terms of the nuance of policy? Because it’s not black and white, it’s gray as you say. It’s an awful lot of differing cogs and tools and things going wrong. And the information is never perfect. How do you think about communicating with people?

MLMcD: That’s true and I think that’s tied in with the wider and actually a deeper malaise in Irish politics, which runs something as follows. The political establishment ie Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for generations and generations say this is how it is, it’s only this way and it can’t be any other way. We suffer from that in Ireland and huge, fundamental, really important blocks of policy where the consensus is so overwhelming, has been so overwhelmingly constructed I should say, that there is no real sense in the public mind or in the political discourse. This is all about choices. Politics is all about making choices all day, every day. Big choices, smaller choices, things with huge public impact, things that go unseen. So there has to be an honesty about that. It’s wrong to say there is simply one way of doing things or viewing things or one policy path, and it’s that way or no way.

And that’s why I think you hear that in the political course. We did that because we did it, we think this way, because we think this way. I think that has to be challenged. I mean, let me say very openly that for us, for Sinn Féin, for our politics, for Sinn Féin in government, it will always be about making the choices with eyes wide open that there are different, there are paths that diverge in the woods. You choose the path that you take and you do that in good faith, you do that with as complete information, Stephen, as you can possibly have. And then of course, you have to come out and explain why you made this choice and not that choice, isn’t that the essence of what accountability is? But if you look at like the stream of successive governments, without getting into the nitty specifics, but just the feel of governments is that governments come, governments go, things stay the same.

Sometimes staying the same is the right place to be by the way. Sometimes if you’re on the right track, why would you depart from it? But very often staying the same is the wrong thing. It’s not responsive to the world and how it’s evolving. It’s not responsive to the reality of people’s lives and kind of the politics of the same old, same breed cynicism. It kills off innovation or ambition and energy across the society, all of the things that you need to actually breed health, happiness, success and prosperity. So yes, this is all about choices and I’m very much in favour of explaining.

So let me give you an example – PRSI social insurance fund, – so we all now know it’s one of the things after the pandemic. Everyone, including IBEC I was delighted to hear, has acknowledged that our Social Security net is not fit for purpose.

So we now accept that. And that’s good because we need to talk about that, we know that employers’ PRSI is in particular an outlier. We’re way out of whack with our European counterparts. We’ve known this for a long time. However, in the course of the last election, we said out loud, this is a problem. And we said out loud, we need to fix this. And what that sparked was mass hysteria almost from some of our competition who take that statement of fact and try and turn it into some kind of conspiracy against prosperity, jobs and business, which it’s not. It’s just a statement of fact.

So if you’re in a climate where statements of the blindingly obvious create this kind of reaction from politics that just doesn’t want to let go or let other people in or other ideas in, well then you’re not going to have an atmosphere that’s conducive to any political figure coming out and saying, “listen folks, I had to call this, here’s what I had available to me, here’s my analysis for it, here’s why I made that decision and here’s how I stand over it”.

What I’ve described to you just on this social insurance issue, you can replicate that across virtually every area of policy where there’s just a knee jerk reaction from the establishment that says no, nobody else can have a better idea. Nobody else can say something that’s manifestly the truth without literally a pile on.

So anyway, that was them during the election. Now we’re in a different space on that issue and others, people are acknowledging that things need to change. And by the way, that’s good. For us, it’s not about us being the smartest kid in the class and being right all of the time. There’s nobody and no political party on earth that’s always right. But where things obviously need to be addressed, well then it’s good when eventually you can kind of bring other people on to that ground with you, it’s a very positive thing.

SK: I agree. Mary Lou I want to be very respectful of your time and just finish off by thanking you very much for taking the time to speak with me today. I’ve learned a lot, I could have asked you 25 other things. Maybe we’ll have another opportunity to chat. But let me just stop there and thank you very much for your time.

MLMcD: My pleasure Stephen.