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The greatest week of Michelle O’Neill’s political career should have culminated in her appointment on Friday as first minister of Northern Ireland, crowning the nationalist Sinn Féin party’s triumph in becoming the region’s biggest for the first time.
Instead, she will have to wait. Election runner-up the Democratic Unionist party has put forming a new power-sharing executive on hold until its demands over post-Brexit trade for the region are fulfilled — a tactic O’Neill says is “holding the people to ransom”.
The DUP has also paralysed the Stormont assembly by refusing to elect a speaker backed by nationalists, bringing local politics to a standstill while London wages a high-stakes Brexit battle with Brussels.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson will visit Belfast on Monday and O’Neill has said she will tell him bluntly “to stop pandering to the DUP”.
Despite the political tensions, she has stuck to business-as-usual, visiting an overstretched hospital emergency department to discuss the creaking health service and hearing farmers’ cost-of-living worries at an agricultural show.
That reflects Sinn Féin’s vote-winning focus on ordinary people’s frustrations with Northern Ireland’s stop-start politics and the party’s campaign manifesto mantra of fixing bread-and-butter issues.
But it is O’Neill’s easy smile and unpretentious image that have made her an asset for a party with what many voters still consider a toxic history: it was seen as the mouthpiece of the IRA, the republican paramilitary group, during Northern Ireland’s three decades of conflict, known as the Troubles, that ended in 1998.
Unruffled and relentlessly on-message, repeating that Sinn Féin wants to fix people’s problems, rather than highlighting its goal of Irish reunification, she helped her party come top in the May 5 elections for the first time in a region created in 1921 for unionists who cherished their place in the UK.
For Sinn Féin’s base, O’Neill has pedigree. Her late father was an IRA prisoner and her uncle heads the republican fundraising body in the US, Noraid. She has honoured combatants while preaching a message that conflict is firmly in the past.
But crucially, for a rebranded party that is now the most popular north and south of the Irish border, neither O’Neill nor Sinn Féin’s Dublin-based president, Mary Lou McDonald, were in the IRA.
“She ran a positive campaign and people responded to that. You can either motivate people with hope or fear,” said Stephen Kelly, head of Manufacturing NI, a trade group.
O’Neill cuts a stylish figure and has the common touch, a working-class 16-year-old mother almost “written off” by teachers at her Catholic school after becoming pregnant. She later said she had been determined that “I wasn’t going to allow anyone to pigeonhole me”.
O’Neill went on to finish school after her own mother gave up her job to help her look after her baby daughter. She later married and had a son, juggling work and career, and honed her people skills at grassroots level as a councillor and mayor.
She was elevated over the heads of veteran figures to become the party’s vice-president and, for the past two years, served as deputy first minister. Despite the inferior title, the role is identical to that of first minister and neither can serve without the other.
“I’m someone who doesn’t do things by halves. I’m an all-in kind of girl,” O’Neill told an International Women’s Day event earlier this year, in which she candidly admitted that she had often felt “nearly a fraud in my own shoes — you always doubt yourself because that’s what women do”.
Some voters remain suspicious and fear Sinn Féin hardliners still pull party strings, with O’Neill and McDonald just figureheads. Affronted unionists recall that O’Neill honoured IRA gunmen as “great lads” a month after becoming party leader in Northern Ireland in 2017.
She knows her party’s politics are divisive and has said she has received “numerous threats” in the past. Indeed, her poll ratings plummeted after she and other senior Sinn Féin figures led mourners to the funeral of Bobby Storey, considered the IRA’s intelligence chief, at the height of lockdown in 2020.
But she did not put a foot wrong in the election campaign ahead of last week’s vote. Her carefully groomed image included a video in which she sits at the kitchen table to chat about her family values, love of cooking and political roots.
Now 45, O’Neill has spent more than half her life in politics. An activist since her teens, she was 21 when the Good Friday peace agreement was signed in 1998. She succeeded her father on the Dungannon council in rural County Tyrone in 2005, became mayor in 2010 and did that job while also serving at Stormont after winning election to the assembly in 2007.
There, she became the political protégée of the late Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander who helped end three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. She served as agriculture and health minister, two of the most challenging portfolios in a region in which three-quarters of the land is farmed and NHS waiting lists are the worst in the UK.
She became deputy first minister in 2020, succeeding McGuinness after Stormont suffered a three-year hiatus when her party pulled out over a scandal.
She said her goal was to bring in progressive policies that go beyond Northern Ireland’s old tribal divisions. “She is engaging and intelligent,” said one official in Belfast. “What she has to figure out is how to have enough independent action without that sense that she’s the final decision maker for the party.”
“Leadership isn’t easy,” the first minister-in-waiting told the Financial Times with her trademark rapid speaking style. She shows no sign of slowing down her political pace, despite the paralysis at Stormont.
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