Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has claimed that the abuse her party has received on the issue of immigration is driven by people who don’t want her party to replace Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
During the party’s ardfheis in Belfast this weekend, spokesman on justice Matt Carthy said that Sinn Féin “did make mistakes” in its handling of the issue of immigration, and that it should have been “far clearer, much sooner” about where it stood.
On Sunday, McDonald was asked about abuse she had received from anti-immigration protesters in Dublin who had branded her a “traitor”.
In response, the opposition leader claimed that the abuse of Sinn Féin’s position on immigration was coming from a small minority who wanted Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to remain in power.
“There has been a very concerted effort by some – it’s a tiny number of people, but they are very loud – to shout lots of people down, it seems particularly me. And I often question, what’s the actual motive of these people? … It seems to me that their actual problem is the prospect of Sinn Féin being a strong, large party with the potential to replace Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in Government. But that’s their business,” McDonald told RTE’s The Week in Politics programme.
In a separate interview on Sunday, McDonald denied that she had undermined the trade union movement when her party offered support to fuel protesters who had engaged in blockades of key infrastructure.
She claimed that Dublin’s inner city felt safer for women when protesters were blocking off O’Connell street.
“There was protesters on O’Connell Street, in the heart of my own constituency, and I have to say, talking to people who live in the inner city, particularly women who’d be out going to jobs and that early in the morning, they said they never felt more safe on O’Connell Street then when the lads were there with their tractors,” McDonald told RTÉ Radio 1’s This Week programme.