‘I'm in politics to make a difference to those who are being left behind’

MEATH WEST CANDIDATE FOCUS: JOHNNY GUIRKE (SINN FEIN)

Even allowing for personal illness, illness of a family member and a bereavement, the harsh political reality may be that Mary Lou McDonald’s leadership of Sinn Fein has taken a “wobble” and that she may find it difficult to regain ground in the wake of the party’s handling of the Stanley and particularly O Donnghaile affairs.

To say that the handling of these issues was cackhanded is an understatement and the leader has to take responsibility for that. However, Meath West Sinn Fein TD, Johnny Guirke pins his colours firmly to the mast, strongly defending his leader.

“I have great time for Mary Lou McDonald, I think she’s brilliant to tell you the truth. She is the best leader in the Dáil by a mile. But that’s not to say that we didn’t make mistakes, we all make mistakes, we made mistakes on different things, including the Referendum. But everyone is human. You have to get back and correct these mistakes”.

He maintains that the media and other parties know that McDonald was the “key driver” behind the vote for Sinn Fein. “If you spend 18 months hammering her, hammering her and hammering her, of course you’re going to bring her down. And that’s not taking away from the fact that the party made mistakes. What do you do? You have to turn it around and get up on the horse again and move forward. She is a very capable and able woman, no one will doubt that and she has my support, 100 per cent.

He cuts a clear division between the Stanley and the O Donnghaile affairs, saying that when a complaint was made against Brian Stanley the party had no option but to investigate it and the party had done that. When to came to the O Donnghaile issue he says that he should never have sent messages to a 16-year-old boy “and nobody can condone that”.

Is he aware that people feel that there is a great deal of control over what the party’s TDs feel and think? “Well, there’s no control over my opinion. We have meetings every week. Everybody can signal if they want to speak and I do. There is no control over anybody, that’s media driven. I have gone to meetings across Meath West with Mary Lou McDonald and you could have 100-150 people attending. Anybody in that audience can put up their hand and ask a question. There is nobody telling you ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do that’.

He is not concerned about the recent polls showing Sinn Fein taking a dip. “In all there’s only a couple of percentage points between Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein.

Even though he wasn’t active in politics when he lived in Boston from 1988 onwards for 18 years, Johnny Guirke involved himself in a form of “constituency work”, giving a leg up to young people arriving to the US for summer jobs, helping them to get a place to stay, placing them in employment, in general “getting them on their feet” towards earning their first month’s pay. In 1995, he and others founded the Aidan McAnespie Gaelic Football Club, a club that is still going strong today.

When he came home in 2005 he worked for the Kiernan Construction company. He is part of the Moylagh JFK 50 Mile Challenge organisation which to date has raised €1.4 million for cancer services. His political career started in 2014 when the late Cllr Joe Reilly asked him to contest the local elections. He “had no intention or no interest” at the time but Reilly was persistent and got him onto the ticket. Re-elected in 2019, he was back on the hustings in the General Election of 2020, heading the poll and elected on the first count with 30 per cent of the vote.

He states that he is in politics “to make a difference”, and especially to help people with disability, mental health issues, and those who are “being left behind”. He insists that the country has to invest much more money in mental health services. “When you see children not being assessed for medical conditions for years and years you have to wonder where we are going as a society.

“Housing is a huge issue, wherever you are. In Sinn Fein we have a great housing plan under Eoin O Broin and it will be a game changer if we get to implement it. All the experts in the field welcomed it and there is a great amount of money set down for it reflecting the scale of the housing emergency we are in. The only ones who have said it is a bad plan are Fine Gael and Fianna Fail”.

All politics is local and when Guirke turns to his own constituency he says that one of the outstanding needs for the county is the restoration of the Navan rail line. It has reached the planning stage this week and “while that is to be welcomed”, that project has to be moved in, he says. Transport Infrastructure Ireland has 30 billion in projects envisaged but only has 30 billion to spend, he states, claiming that the Navan rail project is not included in that.

He sharply reminds senior ministers of 2010 who promised that “the money was there for it” and it would be up and running by 2016, that the project still had to get off the ground. He and his party leader Mary Lou McDonald had made a commitment that they would push the project forward if in power. There are still major issues with Navan hospital, he claimed. The pressure on the Lourdes Hospital is “huge” and the people of Meath need to study what happened when the hospitals in Nenagh and Clare were downgraded. In 20019-10 a regional hospital had been promised for Navan but that had never materialised. “We need more investment in Navan hospital, simple as that”. There were also issues in South Meath with school places and water services, especially in Enfield, Ballivor and Trim. House building in the county will slow down if Irish Water is unable to provide services.