By Brendan Carlin and Lee Harpin For The Mail On Sunday
00:21 08 Oct 2023, updated 00:22 08 Oct 2023
- Andy McDonald forced to take action against caseworker Roisin Nic Lochlainn
A senior Labour MP has been forced to suspend one of his staff today for appearing to joke about the IRA assassination of King Charles’s great-uncle Lord Mountbatten.
Andy McDonald, who served in Sir Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet, took action against constituency caseworker Roisin Nic Lochlainn after this newspaper challenged him over his aide’s offensive social media posts – which she ‘apologised unreservedly’ for.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal how ardent Irish republican sympathiser Ms Nic Lochlainn, 23, appeared to make light of his death in a post on X, formerly Twitter, last year.
It read: ‘OK question for all the Brits flooding my replies and quote tweets, how’s Mountbatten doing xx.’
The King’s confidant died in 1979 when his boat was blown to pieces by an IRA bomb.
Last month, she ‘liked’ an X post which attacked the Royal Family as ‘child abusers and racists’ and, in 2018, quoted a poem which mocked the ‘blood-soaked’ Remembrance Day poppy in a Facebook post.
On the eve of Labour’s annual conference, Mr McDonald stressed that he had been unaware of the ‘wholly unacceptable’ comments.
The MP for Middlesbrough added in a statement: ‘I fully appreciate that some of these remarks were made by her as a teenager but in all the circumstances I have suspended Roisin’s employment pending the outcome of our internal inquiries and processes.’
