Michelle O’Neill, a Mid-Ulster MLA and the Minister for Health in the collapsed powersharing administration, is expected to be nominated by Sinn Féin on Monday as its leader in the North for the forthcoming Assembly elections.
Senior figures in Sinn Féin are thought to have agreed in recent months that Ms O’Neill, who recently turned 40, should succeed Martin McGuinness who has retired from politics because of ill health.
Ms O’Neill is due to deliver the closing address at a Sinn Féin conference on Irish unity at the Mansion House in Dublin on Saturday.
The move in the North marks a shift in Sinn Féin from the generation of leaders with links to the IRA to a younger cadre who have grown up since the ceasefires of the 1990s.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, who has led the party since 1983, has acknowledged it is in a process of “transition”. He said Mr McGuinness was not retiring, but just standing down from office for health reasons, and he hoped he would be back.
He said Mr McGuinness intended to continue as best he could, and “hopefully in the fullness of health he’ll be back with the rest of us, moving forward against the consequences of Brexit, facing up to the bad policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael”.
Prominent
Ms O’Neill, who also served as agriculture minister, has been increasingly prominent in Stormont in recent months. Married with two children, she has been an Assembly member for Mid-Ulster for the past 10 years and, in terms of ministerial office, is one of the party’s most experienced politicians in the North.
Mr McGuinness’s plans to retire were accelerated by his illness and the forthcoming Assembly election, which was called earlier this week after the Executive collapsed over the controversial “cash-for-ash” scheme.
Last Thursday the outgoing Sinn Féin Minister for Finance Máirtín Ó Muilleoir announced he is to institute a public inquiry into the renewable heat incentive (RHI) scheme.
The scheme was designed to encourage businesses, farmers and other non-domestic heating-users to switch from fossil fuel to eco-friendly systems such as wood-pellet boilers. However, because of a lack of cost controls it is projected the scheme could cost up to £490 million (€567m) over the next 20 years.
