The only difference between Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin is “which of them is top dog”, Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald has told the party’s ardfheis.
In a sharp attack on Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, she said the big issues were left to drift as the two leaders jockeyed for position in an eight-week “farce played out on a grand scale”.
Party leader Gerry Adams had earlier said the two parties should “set a deadline” for talks or call an election.
He told reporters he and Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness had years of negotiations behind them. “You go in to a room and you stay in the room and you crunch this and you do it in a short period, not over eight weeks.”
Ms McDonald warned the two parties that while they did not want Sinn Féin either in government or leading opposition, “Sinn Féin is not going away”.
And to applause she said on the opening night of the ardfheis in the Convention Centre in Dublin that her party “will challenge Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil every time they try to short change the Irish people.
“Sinn Féin from this ardfheis repeats our call for the full abolition of water charges, nothing less, no half measures, no convenient fig leaves will do,” she said of the issue that most divides the two parties in government formation discussions.
“We will not prop up a Fine Gael government that favours only the wealthy and disregards the rest,” she said.
“We will not play the game of make believe that Fianna Fáil are acting responsibly or in the ‘national interest’. They act only in their own narrow self- interest.”
Her party would be the “leader of opposition to bad government” and in anticipation of a possible early election, she said “we want to be and we will be part of a government that champions the people.
“We will face the challenge of government when it is afforded to us by the people with energy and integrity.”
‘Agreed Ireland’
As the North faces Assembly elections next month, Mr McGuinness said an “agreed Ireland” is achievable and desirable.
Mr McGuinness, in an interesting choice of language, referred to the opportunity to create an “agreed Ireland”, a phrase he used three times in his keynote speech on Friday night.
It is also a phrase regularly used by former SDLP leader John Hume during much of the peace process as a substitute for a united Ireland achieved through violence or compulsion, and a phrase seldom if ever used by Sinn Féin.
In his speech, Mr McGuinness also focused on achieving reconciliation, as did the Sinn Féin chairman Declan Kearney.
The both commended a 17-page document, “Towards and Agreed and Reconciled Future” published to coincide with the ardfheis.
“A century on from the Rising and 35 years from the hunger strikes an agreed Ireland is desirable. An agreed Ireland is achievable,” said Mr McGuinness.
He also said that republicans had a “responsibility and a duty to reach out to the unionist community in a spirit of generosity” even if “others don’t always reciprocate”.
Mr McGuinness was also scathing in his denunciation of the “extremes within loyalism” and of dissident republicans. He said those who murdered prison officer Adrian Ismay in a bomb attack in Belfast and Michael McKibbon in a so-called punishment shooting in Belfast , and seriously injured Harry Boyle in Derry in a second “punishment” shooting were “waging war on our communities”..
“But their campaign - which couldn’t be called a military campaign - is not only futile it is without support,” said Mr McGuinness, adding that they had been rejected by the people of Ireland.
Democratic project
And ahead of next month’s Northern Ireland Assembly elections Mr McGuinness added, “It is the Sinn Féin national and democratic project which citizens are embracing. In increasing numbers they are voting for us to build the peace, to promote consensus. They are voting for an agreed Ireland, an Ireland of equals.”
Mr Kearney referred to last year’s “deeply historic and symbolic meeting between the leadership of Sinn Féin and Prince Charles, against the backdrop of his own pilgrimage to remember his uncle killed by the IRA”.
“Just as a few extremists have always been hostile to the peace process, some state and political interests did not want that meeting to occur, or the symbolism of its message to be seen or heard. They are wrong. There is a bigger picture,” he added.
“Those of us who share a strategic vision for the peace process must reach out to each other and encourage an inclusive national conversation on reconciliation. That is, an authentic public discourse on reconciliation between republicans and unionists; green and orange; Irish and British; and, those of no tradition, or faith,” said Mr Kearney.
