Michael O'Regan is journalist and former parliamentary correspondent of The Irish Times. He says he doesn’t have a book for me to plug, ‘yet’.

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I managed to grab an interview with Sinn Féin’s
Aengus Ó Snodaigh at the election count in the RDS. To put this in context, Aengus
Ó Snodaigh got one of the highest votes of any politician in the country, and
at the moment I spoke to him those votes were being counted and tallied – it
might have been quicker to weigh them – so of course I started with
congratulating with on his vote.

But I really wanted to ask him about a
topic that I think is very relevant given the possibility that was emerging
then of Sinn Féin going into government.

The Cash for Ash scandal in Northern
Ireland, whereby some people in the know, often DUP supporters, made huge
amounts of money claiming subsidies for renewable heating that were vastly
higher than what they actually spent on the heating bills.

To Sinn Féin’s credit, it’s clear that
their politicians did not have their sticky hands in the till on this, unlike
some others. But the enquiry into this revealed a series of emails that Sinn
Féin clearly would rather have remained secret, and it’s clear that the emails
were written in the belief that they would never come to light.

Máirtín Ó Muilleoir was the Sinn Féin finance minister in the
Northern Irish executive from 2016 to 2017 when the executive collapsed. Ó
Muilleoir wrote an email to Ted Howell. Howell is a secretive figure who largely
disappeared in the early 1970s, probably to work for the IRA outside Ireland,
and re-emerged on the Árd Chomhairle of Sinn Féin during the peach process.

No serious commentator
doubts that Howell was the closest of confidants to Gerry Adams, and a senior
member of the provisional IRA.

And the email that Sinn Féin finance
minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir sent to Howell asked whether he, Howell, was content if the writer, Ó
Muilleoir, would make particular decisions in his capacity as minis...