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Michael O’Regan is journalist and former parliamentary correspondent of The Irish Times. He says he doesn’t have a book for me to plug, ‘yet’.
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I managed to grab an interview with Sinn Féin’s Aengus Ó Snodaigh at the election count in the RDS. To put this in context, Aengus Ó Snodaigh got one of the highest votes of any politician in the country, and at the moment I spoke to him those votes were being counted and tallied – it might have been quicker to weigh them – so of course I started with congratulating with on his vote.
But I really wanted to ask him about a topic that I think is very relevant given the possibility that was emerging then of Sinn Féin going into government.
The Cash for Ash scandal in Northern Ireland, whereby some people in the know, often DUP supporters, made huge amounts of money claiming subsidies for renewable heating that were vastly higher than what they actually spent on the heating bills.
To Sinn Féin’s credit, it’s clear that their politicians did not have their sticky hands in the till on this, unlike some others. But the enquiry into this revealed a series of emails that Sinn Féin clearly would rather have remained secret, and it’s clear that the emails were written in the belief that they would never come to light.
Máirtín Ó Muilleoir was the Sinn Féin finance minister in the Northern Irish executive from 2016 to 2017 when the executive collapsed. Ó Muilleoir wrote an email to Ted Howell. Howell is a secretive figure who largely disappeared in the early 1970s, probably to work for the IRA outside Ireland, and re-emerged on the Árd Chomhairle of Sinn Féin during the peace process.
No serious commentator doubts that Howell was the closest of confidants to Gerry Adams, and a senior member of the provisional IRA.
And the email that Sinn Féin finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir sent to Howell asked whether he, Howell, was content if the writer, Ó Muilleoir, would make particular decisions in his capacity as minister.
That’s dodgy as hell. It’s also extra-constitutional. Ministers, north or south, have a particular duty in law, and that is to make executive decisions. They are not supposed to be the vassal for other people’s decisions.
Whatever about actions in the past, any minister elected now has a duty to be the bona fide person who is answerable to the electorate for what they do, not answerable to an entity, any entity, that meets in private. That’s the context for some of the questions that I ask Aengus Ó Snodaigh here.
