[Foreword: I hate having to do this but if you were off sick the day they did Irony in school, please stop reading now…]

Dear Mary Lou,

You don’t know me but I know you. That is, I’ve seen you on the television and I’ve liked what I’ve seen – and heard. For a start, you’ve got a very nice little face. You’ve got nice bright clothes and you don’t talk in a Northern accent. You never were in the IRA, the group which caused all the murder and mayhem of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and I can tell by the way you talk that you’ve been educated, probably in a nice school. Which makes me feel so sad that you’ve chosen to join Sinn Féin. I was talking to a taxi-driver the other night and he summed Sinn Féin up: “Sure they go round killing people!”. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

The thing is, I think you are a really talented politician. You can speak in sentences and you performed really well in the Dail and when you appeared on that Late Late Show. So I think you should heed a bit of advice which is available to you today in the Irish Times. It’s in an article written by a good friend of mine, Noel Whelan, who knows just about everything there is to know about politics, and particularly northern politics, and he has identified where you’re going wrong.

“Since Wednesday night, McDonald has had to go on media and use 1980s rhetoric about how the arrest of her party president was politically motivated”.

Now I grant you there are elections in a couple of weeks or so but believe me and Noel: that had nothing to do with Gerry Adams’s arrest. That’s why Noel has said you’ve been forced to use“1980s rhetoric”. He knows, like the Taoiseach, that the RUC has gone completely away. If you were to search high and low in the ranks of the PSNI, nowhere would you find anyone who had worked in the old RUC or who had inherited any of the thinking of the RUC. How do I know that? Because Noel says that sort of person was in Northern Ireland’s police force only in the 1980s. And he knows everything about politics. Especially northern politics.

Now I hope you won’t think Noel has something against you, Mary Lou. He admires you. So do I. We both like – and Noel says it in the article – the way you cross-examined “overpaid charity executives” and challenged “incommunicative bankers”. Top marks. But you see, in standing by the president of your party and saying his arrest has anything to do with the elections, you’re making people not like you. No, seriously. That’s how these things work. You stand close enough to someone that the media don’t like, next you know they won’t like you either.

So as someone who admires you and has your interests at heart, I want to give you some advice.

Never refer to Gerry Adams without referring to the IRA later in the same sentence. Never make any mention of a man, woman or child who was killed by the British army or the RUC or the UDR during the Troubles – that’s just Sinn Féin propaganda. Make it clear that you blame the IRA for igniting and sustaining the conflict in the north from start to finish . Finally, make no reference of any kind to Gerry Adams’s part in moving the IRA from conflict to peace. Nobody will thank you for it. In fact as my friend Noel says, the fair-minded voters here in the south will stop liking you if you don’t get as far away from Gerry Adams as you possibly can. Better still – and this is my idea, not Noel’s, but I bet he’d agree with me – you should declare Gerry Adams damaged goods and become the president of Sinn Féin. Trust me: if you do, people will like you far more. And think what a nice life you’d have!

I hope you’ll take this advice in the spirit it’s offered, Mary Lou. You’re a nice young woman and I hate to see you mixed up with an uneducated, coarse crowd of trouble-makers. Or should I say, Troubles-makers, ha ha!

Best wishes for a better future.

Le meas

Seoirse O Damadán.