DUBLIN — Sinn Féin wants the speaker’s head — but Prime Minister Micheál Martin says they can’t have it.
The crisis within Ireland’s fledgling parliament deepened Wednesday as Sinn Féin and other opposition leaders demanded the resignation of Verona Murphy, a sharp-tongued ex-trucker who was appointed as speaker only three months ago.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said her party expects the speaker’s resignation by the end of the week, otherwise her party will introduce a formal no-confidence motion.
But Martin — whose own January election as Taoiseach was delayed by Sinn Féin-led obstruction tactics — said he wasn’t willing to see anyone get “intimidated” out of office.
“Your tactics are well known,” Martin told the Sinn Féin chief a day after parliament had to be suspended amid unrelenting opposition heckling of Martin and Murphy. “But they will be met by steel on this side of the house, because you’re not going to run the house, Deputy McDonald.”
In Ireland’s parliamentary system, the speaker is supposed to be politically neutral and able to command the confidence of both sides of the house. By tradition, if any major party expresses it’s lost confidence in the speaker, the office-holder is expected to resign.
But that might not happen this time, setting the scene for protracted blow-ups and suspensions.
McDonald and other opposition party leaders accused Murphy of siding with the government Tuesday, when she overrode the opposition’s attempts to block a vote on a government motion.
That motion, passed in disputed circumstances, created new weekly speaking slots for a small pro-government grouping of lawmakers called the Regional Independents. Their support is crucial for Martin’s two-party coalition to wield a majority in the Dáil Éireann parliament.
The political problem for Murphy is that, until she got her surprise promotion with Martin’s backing, she was a Regional Independent too. She’s being widely seen now to be promoting the interests of the Regional Independents and particularly its key figure, Tipperary lawmaker Michael Lowry, who wants a role in parliamentary debating time normally reserved for opposition voices.
McDonald — whose nationalist party finished second to Martin’s center-ground Fianna Fáil in November’s election — directed her fire directly at Murphy as she demanded her resignation.
The speaker, McDonald said, “bulldozed Dáil rules to get the government’s plan over the line. To protect the very deal that put her in her position. A deal brokered by her mentor Michael Lowry, who sat smiling and giving the two fingers to the people of Ireland whilst the chaos unfolded.”
McDonald told Murphy: “The Dáil cannot function properly whilst you remain in the chair. … You need to go.”
Such demands for a speaker’s resignation on alleged bias grounds are virtually without precedent in Ireland. The last speaker forced to quit, Fianna Fáil’s John O’Donoghue in 2009, did so because of a media investigation into exorbitant travel expenses in his previous government ministerial role, not as speaker.
Murphy — who spent much of Tuesday’s shortened session pleading, in vain, for Sinn Féin and other opposition leaders to respect her position and to stop heckling her — issued a defiant statement Wednesday night.
“Prolonged disorder and obstruction is utterly unacceptable in any democratic parliament. So too is making false accusations of partiality and collusion against its officials and chair,” said Murphy, who vowed “to continue to carry out the onerous office to which I was elected.”
Martin stressed to the house that he wasn’t willing to let Sinn Féin get its way.
“You’ve created a new precedent,” he told McDonald. “We’re now in a new position where, if you successfully barrack and intimidate people enough, you will get your way. And we can’t allow that (to) happen.”
He noted how Sinn Féin, once the public face of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, hadn’t even recognized the political legitimacy of the Republic of Ireland until the mid-1980s when it started to contest Irish elections here.
Martin said he feared that Ireland’s democratic system faced “a new era of total opposition” by Sinn Féin “making it impossible to do business unless the minority allows it … a refusal to respect basic rules.”
“You would do anything to undermine the institutions of this state, which you’ve never been very loyal to in your long history,” Martin said to the Sinn Féin leader.
Presuming that Murphy doesn’t table her resignation beforehand, Sinn Féin plans to table a formal no-confidence vote Tuesday. Other opposition parties, including the Labour Party, Social Democrats and the socialist Solidarity-People Before Profit, have pledged to join Sinn Féin in seeking Murphy’s ouster. They don’t have enough votes to prevail, but it would create an unprecedented division in Ireland’s parliament.
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