American-born Kathy Sinnott MEP talks to CATHERINE REILLY about the struggle for disability rights, her controversial stance on abortion, and how she was branded as the face of the European Parliament’s ‘gravy train’
CHICAGO-BORN Kathy Sinnott wasn’t always destined for politics, but the family heritage was certainly pointing that way.
“My grandfather had been Cook County Commissioner during the height of Al Capone and that whole thing in Chicago,” she recalls, “and looking at the old newspaper clippings he was called the ‘honest politician’. I was proud that he was called the honest politician but it was only years later when I grew up that I realised that he really was honest, and what an unusual thing that was in 1930s Chicago.”
Indeed, it was through her late Newry-born grandfather that Sinnott, who was elected an MEP for Ireland South in 2004, gained Irish citizenship. She departed the US in favour of attending university in Dublin in the early 1970s.
“I think one of the things I found so strange was that everyone was the same colour,” she recalls of her arrival into Ireland. “To me, coming from Chicago, this was really odd. Everyone looked kind of so the same – and I don’t just mean the same colour, everyone looked Irish or what I thought of as Irish. It felt like you were just in a neighbourhood and not in an actual country,” laughs Sinnott, whose accent is a mix of American twang and Irish lilt. “But everyone was really friendly,” she adds. “Everyone chatted to you. It was like coming home to a family gathering.”
Sinnott is an articulate woman, not short of a word and seemingly frank when it comes to difficult questions. Yet it appears unlikely that she ever would have entered politics were it not for the fact that a deeply personal challenge catapulted her into the consciousness of Irish public life.
In 2000, on behalf of her autistic adult son Jamie, Sinnott took a high-profile court case arguing that the State had an obligation to meet Jamie’s primary education needs. In its judgement, the High Court ruled that Jamie Sinnott’s constitutional rights would be breached if the State did not supply him with a primary education, but the Supreme Court later over-ruled this judgement, finding that the right to primary education under the constitution only extends to the age of 18. The government did not, however, contest the damages awarded to the Sinnotts in the High Court case.
For Sinnott, a mother of nine, the decision to go to court was not a particularly difficult one – and she only wishes she’d done so sooner.
“It was by 1983 that I’d started my first disability group and we were pushing for education, which was kind of unheard of for severe and profoundly disabled children at that stage,” she remembers. “We campaigned and it just came to the point where there didn’t seem to be any other option, and in fact when it went to court I just wished I’d done it 20 years earlier because since then he has had an education, he has a home-based programme, which is what the judge recommended.”
Sinnott says the impact of this development on Jamie has been phenomenal. “He has gone from a wheelchair, which he was using quite a lot at the time of the case, to walking about two kilometres now. He’s 31, he’s profoundly disabled, and yet he’s out of nappies now, he makes simple choices. He couldn’t feed himself at the time of the court case yet now he can feed himself and take his bowl up to the sink – which a mother likes.”
He smiles now too, adds Sinnott. “He looks much better,” she says, “and he’s still learning.”
Sinnott believes her son was let down by successive governments – “everyone likes to talk when in opposition, but they’ve all been the same” – and when deciding to enter politics, she decided to stay non-party.
Her decision to enter politics, she intimates, was as a means of moving her disability rights campaigning to another level. She originally ran in the 2002 general election (winning a seat in Cork South Central by a marginal number of votes and losing on the recount), and decided that Europe might be an even better platform on which to pursue her agenda.
“I ran as an MEP because I thought maybe I can do more out there, and I really have,” she says. “I have a lot of arguments with the way the EU is set up, I think there’s huge democracy problems, huge structural problems surrounding the position of the citizen. However, having said that, as an MEP there is an incredible leeway you have to work on projects, things you want to do.
“I’ve initiated a major European project on autism called the European Autism Information System, because the main deficit on autism in Europe is that no one knows even how many [are affected], what age the kids are, what they are suffering from. There’s a complete information deficit, and funding bodies and government only work on information.”
Sinnott adds that as part of this project, six universities are now conducting major research into the area. She has also helped initiate two research studies in Ireland into the issue of people with disabilities in emergency situations.
“If you take an adult with autism in sheltered living, for example, and you’ve got a smoke alarm and it goes off, he’s hearing-sensitive and locks himself in a bathroom because he’s terrified by the sound – and dies as a result,” she explains.
Sinnott, who is vice-president of the European Parliament’s disabilities group, which tenders disability-related amendments to proposed legislation, admits she plays to her “strengths” in terms of the disability area, which is her primary focus.
The perception of the European Parliament in Ireland is not a flattering one. A manicured talk-shop, followed by wine receptions and back-slaps, is an image that springs into the minds of many.
Sinnott, who earlier this year was entangled in an ‘expenses’ controversy herself, says some MEPs view their sojourn in Europe as an ideal retirement plan.
“There are MEPs here who see it as like a retirement plan, that’s for sure. Absolutely. And there are MEPs that do very little, there are MEPs who are presidents of companies and this is their ‘other job’. But there are MEPs who work very hard and I think for the most part the Irish ones are among those.”
Sinnott describes herself as “the least gravy-train person there is” and says she often loses money she’s entitled to because she doesn’t file her reimbursement paperwork in time. However, earlier this year Sinnott was among the MEPs pictured on German television queuing for expenses for the day – with airport-bound suitcases in tow.
Still annoyed about the debacle and how it has come to be associated with her, she says that the previous afternoon, she had attended a human rights debate which is regularly held on Thursday afternoons.
“You are entitled to sign on on Friday morning because of the travel thing,” she says, adding that following the Thursday debate she had stayed in the parliament working all night rather than “waste time” travelling back to Ireland at that point.
That morning, she came down to find a German television reporter asking the MEPs, who had suitcases in tow, why they were signing on for that day’s expenses when they were planning to fly home.
“I was the only MEP that walked over, quite openly talked to him, explained what the allowance was for, that it wasn’t for working on Friday, it was for attending on Thursday. He just kept abusing me, abusing me, abusing me until I just looked impatient, and that is the clip that’s on YouTube.”
Sinnott says that the fact she showed evidence of working through the night by presenting e-mails she’d sent to herself (she has three offices, in Brussels, Strasbourg, Cork) was manufactured into a “see, she’s lying” conspiracy.
“Literally I would be one of the hardest-working MEPs there, the least gravy-trainish, and my name is all over Europe for ‘gravy train’, so what do you do? You don’t do anything, you just say ‘Well that taught me a lesson anyways.’”
Sinnott claims that attendance at the Thursday afternoon human rights debates has declined dramatically in recent years, with some MEPs scared stiff of being construed as having milked the expenses system.
It has been quite a turbulent few months for Ireland in European terms, with the country’s ‘no’ to the Lisbon Treaty having shaken Europe’s corridors of power to their well-furnished core. Sinnott, a strong ‘no’ advocate, insists that Ireland’s reputation is only in question among Europe’s elite, who she says are motivated by self-interest.
However, some of the behaviour following the result angered the Irish public, irrespective of how they’d voted. Members of the UKIP – who Sinnott is aligned with in the parliament –donned silly hats after the Lisbon referendum result and seemed to be ridiculing the Irish, albeit while supporting the ‘no’ result.
“That was quite irritating to me as well,” replies Sinnott. However, she adds that T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Respect the Irish Vote’ were worn across sections of the parliament (messaged T-shirts and banners are not uncommon in the European Parliament) and that MEPs from 17 countries donned the same T-shirt and cheered the Irish vote.
“The Irish Times presented it as if it was the UKIP making fun of us. They knew better, they knew exactly... they were there and they saw all over the parliament, left, right, centre, everywhere people were wearing T-shirts. There were about 90 MEPs wearing T-shirts. They absolutely manipulated that.”
Sinnott says her own ‘no’ stance was motivated more by what wasn’t in the treaty, rather than what was.
“If Europe isn’t democratic what’s it going to be?” she asks, adding that it would be unacceptable to have a veritable president (as in the president of the European Council), prime minister (as president of the European Commission) and secretary of state (high representative of foreign affairs), all unelected by the people. Already, says Sinnott, the EU has an unnerving democratic deficit, with the European Commission writing the laws, and the elected parliamentarians only permitted to add amendments.
Sinnott is a noted social conservative, and besides the disability issue, has become most associated in the public mind with her anti-abortion stance. She says that close friends of hers have had abortions, and that it “never sits easy with them”.
The Irish-American believes that if the right supports are in place, women can feel confident enough to go ahead with an unexpected or difficult pregnancy. However, despite her fellow feeling for women in such positions (she says she’s faced pregnancy with her husband gone – “deserted – no money” and as a high-risk candidate to have another child with a disability), she nevertheless makes some highly emotive and potentially upsetting inferences in relation to abortion.
“When you row it back and look at the essentials, we’re still doing the same thing that Hitler did... that there is a section of the human race to which we’re not going to give human status. And it’s uncomfortable, but is there any other way of looking at it? People like to keep it a religious issue, but it’s a human issue.”
One issue that Sinnott has perhaps not been so outspoken about is racism and integration, although she contends that she has made efforts in this regard, particularly in the Cork area. She says she fears that the catastrophic loss of jobs at Dell will feed anti-immigrant sentiment and says that her requests to meet Dell directors were refused on several occasions last year.
“The fact that Dell is going to Poland, there is this creeping [feeling of] ‘Well the Poles came here and took our money and now they’ve taken our business.’ There’s a creeping anti-foreign thing and it’s ominous to me. I mean I’m an immigrant into Ireland in a sense. Okay, I’m an Irish citizen, but I came, I was able to get an education – I’m an MEP. I mean, I’m an immigrant and I was welcomed. And I just see that welcome disappearing.”
Sinnott plans to run again as an independent in this summer’s European elections, and it will be interesting to note what these more recessionary times have in store for a woman that some dismiss as a single-issue representative, and who others hail as a champion of disability rights both at home and abroad. n
