When Michelle O’Neill is sworn in as Northern Ireland’s first minister, it will be a moment of personal triumph steeped in irony. As a teenage mother, she was treated as if she had the “plague”, and wept, yet went on to ascend the ranks of Sinn Féin and is now poised to make history as the first nationalist to lead Northern Ireland – a state that, in theory, she wishes to eradicate. There is little expectation of republican thunder when O’Neill takes her post in the gilded chamber of Stormont on Saturday. She has pledged to be a first minister “for all”, unionists as well as nationalists, and to show respect to the royal family. Yet the 47-year-old comes from an IRA family, defends the legitimacy of IRA violence, and honours IRA members who died during the Troubles. How she navigates the tension between these positions will shape her tenure at the helm of an executive that faces immense challenges after two years of political paralysis. O’Neill should have become first minister in May 2022 after Sinn Féin overtook the Democratic Unionist party in an assembly election. But the DUP boycotted power-sharing in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements, leaving Stormont mothballed until a deal with the government coaxed it back this week.
The Sinn Féin deputy leader will head an executive with a DUP deputy first minister who has equal power but less prestige. The two parties, in coalition with Alliance and the Ulster Unionist party, inherit a fiscal crisis, crumbling public services, creaking infrastructure and widespread cynicism about Stormont’s capacity to fix things. Republicans will want progress towards unification, while unionists will want to anchor themselves in the UK. Solomon and Machiavelli might have passed up such a job as impossible, but O’Neill has professed optimism and keenness to “work together with all parties to deliver on the needs and aspirations of workers, families and businesses”. Sexist jibes will not help. Since entering the public eye as a minister and deputy first minister, O’Neill has had to field comments on her appearance. “The beauty from a family drenched in blood,” the Daily Mail declared in 2017. “Glossy blonde hair. Bright lipstick. Curled eyelashes. Painted nails. Figure-hugging outfits. Michelle O’Neill certainly isn’t what we expected.” When Arlene Foster was a DUP first minister, she was pressed in an interview to sum up her Sinn Féin colleague in a word. “Blonde,” she replied. If wounded, O’Neill did not show it. Her public persona is of an open, affable, down-to-earth politician who gets on with her work. Officials at Stormont say she is the same when cameras are not rolling. “No airs, easy to get on with,” said one. O’Neill’s background did not hint at a future hobnobbing in Washington, London and Brussels. She was born Michelle Doris into a working-class family in Clonoe, a village in County Tyrone. Her father, Brendan Doris, was an IRA prisoner and an uncle, Paul Doris, raised funds for the group. Two cousins, IRA members, were shot by security forces, one fatally. Aged 15, she became pregnant and recalled being treated at school “like I was a plague”. At home she collapsed and sobbed. “I’ll never forget that experience and I thought, ‘Nobody will ever treat me like this again,’” she told the Irish Times in 2021. O’Neill’s family helped care for her baby daughter while she completed her A-levels and trained as a welfare rights adviser. In 2005 she won a seat on Dungannon borough council that had previously been held by her father and went on to become a protege of Francie Molloy, a Sinn Féin assembly member, and Martin McGuinness, the party’s dominant figure alongside Gerry Adams. After she was elected to Stormont in 2007, the party hopscotched her over more senior colleagues by appointing her agriculture minister in 2011, health minister in 2015 and deputy first minister in 2017 after McGuinness’s death. “Initially she was seen as a puppet for Adams and the boys,” said Shane Ross, a former Irish government minister and author of a biography of McDonald, using a euphemism for IRA veterans suspected of behind-the-scenes influence. “But she has grown in stature. Her authority is growing. She’s certainly able enough.” O’Neill, now a grandmother, has reached out to unionists by attending King Charles’s coronation and occasionally referring to “Northern Ireland” rather than the “north of Ireland”. She has also accepted Police Service of Northern Ireland protection, a break with the Sinn Féin tradition of using republican bodyguards. But she defends the IRA’s armed campaign up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, saying there was “no alternative”, and attends memorials for former members, including a large funeral in 2020 during Covid restrictions. “It’s hypocritical to go and shake hands with various dignitaries but not condemn the killing of innocent people who were just doing an honest day’s work,” said Roy Crawford, an Ulster Unionist councillor for Fermanagh and Omagh district council. An IRA bomb killed his father, Ivan Crawford, a part-time Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, in 1987. “Justice has not been got. The killers are running free,” he said. “I’m only one of many.” Still, the unionist expressed hope about Stormont’s restoration. “We are entering a new phase of history. We don’t know what the future holds for us. We hope it’s something tangible and positive.”