Sinn Fein’s leaders are used to responding to questions from journalists and political rivals with evasiveness and belligerence. This is a party that was linked inextricably to terrorism, crime and abuse, but its support continued to grow regardless. Against that backdrop, the “Shinners” have come to believe that they can get away with almost anything. In the conspiratorial world of Irish republicanism, scrutiny and criticism can be dismissed as a plot orchestrated by hostile Brits and shadowy “securocrats”. 

That mindset was displayed again this week, as the latest scandal to involve the party dominated front pages in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein failed repeatedly to explain its botched handling of the dismissal of a press officer, who was recently convicted of child sex offences. The party suspended Michael McMonagle from his post and party membership when he was first arrested in 2022. But it failed to inform his subsequent employer or warn authorities at the Northern Ireland Assembly that a paedophile could be roaming their premises.

In fact, two staff members, including Sinn Fein’s powerful head of communications, provided positive references that helped their former colleague secure a job at the British Heart Foundation (BHF). Then, when McMonagle visited Stormont as part of his new duties, its politicians appeared to ignore blithely any safeguarding issues that his presence might create.

The story could perhaps still have been contained, if the party had offered a clear explanation and a genuine apology. Instead, Sinn Fein reacted with its customary spikiness — providing contradictory information in interviews and blaming others for the controversy.

The Sinn Fein MLA, Conor Murphy, told the BBC that his party could not inform the BHF about McMonagle’s arrest, because it might prejudice the investigation; a claim flatly contradicted by Northern Ireland’s chief constable, Jon Boutcher. And the first minister, Michelle O’Neill, accused the charity of a lack of “due diligence” in its recruitment process — an attack that left its staff feeling “wounded” and inflicted “huge operational damage”.

If that display of aggression raised questions about O’Neill’s character, the public was incredulous when she claimed that she had been unaware, until recently, that McMonagle had taken a job with the BHF. A photo quickly emerged of the first minister at an event organised by the charity, with the press officer just a few yards away. The party’s northern leader was just one of several Sinn Fein politicians to employ McMonagle directly, as part of her constituency office staff. He filled several roles at Stormont and Westminster, going back to 2014, and the North Antrim MLA, Philip McGuigan, sponsored his Assembly pass, which was not revoked in the wake of the arrest.

These details have been wrung out of Sinn Fein painstakingly by journalists and Assembly questions that could no longer be ignored. The party tried to blame its staff members, including McMonagle’s two referees, who were quickly sacked, but it has not yet admitted failures or wrongdoing by its political representatives. This is a pattern familiar to those who have watched Sinn Fein go about its business before. The party blustered its way through countless scandals; from running a spy ring at Stormont, to flouting Covid regulations in the most public way, to allegedly covering up other instances of sexual abuse.

The media does not tend to judge Sinn Fein by the same standards as its rivals

Infamously, for some nine years, Gerry Adams failed to tell the police that his brother Liam had raped and abused his own daughter. That omission allowed the paedophile to continue to work with youth groups in Belfast. The author and commentator, Máiría Cahill, accused the movement, including Adams, of covering up her abuse as a teenager by an IRA man. Republicans “closed ranks and protected themselves,” said Ms. Cahill, who was ridiculed and smeared when she tried to tell her story. Despite all this dark history, when the party’s representatives are challenged by political opponents or the media, they usually adopt a tone of moral outrage and self-pity. This unshakeable sense of their own victimhood has, if anything, won them sympathy, particularly from some on the British left.

The media does not tend to judge Sinn Fein by the same standards as its rivals and this story has so far been invisible in national newspapers and TV channels, unlike the DUP’s mishandling of a green energy scheme during 2017. In Northern Ireland, scrutinising republicans was too often portrayed as undermining the “peace process”. In the rest of the UK, stories about the party are met largely with indifference. Perhaps the problem is that we feel we already know too much about Sinn Fein. How can people be shocked by the latest revelation, when the party’s links to abuse, gangsterism and mass murder are so well documented? 

Sinn Fein will find the pressure over McMonagle awkward, but its strategists will hope that these questions will pass and its supporters will remain unmoved. The scandal, though, may further damage its reputation in the Republic of Ireland, where the party’s poll ratings have already crashed from 36 per cent to around 19 per cent. And, in Northern Ireland too, there may be a limit to the dubious behaviour republican voters are prepared to overlook.