Do we like Michelle O’Neill?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A good record on equality and a historic job, held back by a Covid funeral apology, a staffing row and a police inquiry still open.
O’Neill was born Michelle Doris in 1977 and raised in Clonoe, County Tyrone, in a family of prominent republicans: her father was a former IRA prisoner who became a Sinn Féin councillor. She has told the Irish Times “partition failed my community”. She took her father’s council seat in 2005, became an MLA in 2007, and went on to be a minister and Martin McGuinness’s successor as party leader at Stormont.
The stain people remember is the 2020 funeral of republican Bobby Storey. She attended while the Executive she co-led was telling everyone else to limit gatherings. She first said she would never apologise, then offered a “heartfelt and unreserved apology” in 2021, and at the Covid Inquiry in 2024 said “I know that my actions also angered the families.” Critics noted the earlier apology didn’t admit she was wrong to go.
The 2024 McMonagle row was messier. A former Sinn Féin press officer admitted child sex offences, and the Assembly confirmed he was paid from O’Neill’s staffing allowance for a few months in 2020. She apologised to the British Heart Foundation, the charity that later employed him, and called a missed contact with the party’s HR “a serious omission”. The then deputy first minister said the party’s response had “simply not been credible thus far”.
Back in 2018, a BBC interview left O’Neill under fire for not saying she believed Mairia Cahill’s allegations of abuse. A party colleague said publicly he did believe Cahill and that the media were making too much of the difference. It’s an older episode, but it sits alongside the others as a pattern of hesitation when the questions get uncomfortable.
On the harm test she comes up well in what I could open. In 2019 she told a PinkNews event Sinn Féin “will play no part in state sponsored discrimination” on marriage equality. In 2022 she named banning conversion therapy a priority, though tied to the DUP returning to power-sharing. As health minister she lifted the lifetime ban on gay men donating blood. I found nothing harmful and no dodgy company, but I couldn’t open pages on her trans-rights record, so that gap is real.
The fresh stoush is Drumcree. After the Parades Commission allowed an Orange Order parade down the Garvaghy Road for the first time in almost 30 years, residents protested and it didn’t go ahead. The PSNI says it will interview people it suspects of offences over breaches of the commission’s decision, and O’Neill confirmed she’d been invited and would cooperate. Unionist parties tabled no-confidence motions alleging she backed an unlawful protest; she said “when the law is wrong, I will stand firmly against it”, and the motions were reported as defeated.