Mum of the Year Finalist Yemi Adenuga
Woman’s Way and Beko Mum of the Year Finalist and mum of four Yemi Adenuga became the first female black councillor to be elected in Ireland in 2019.
If Yemi Adenuga looks a little familiar, that’s probably because she is. An active force of nature in the local community since she first moved to Navan in 2004, the now Fine Gael councillor and her family were the first migrant family to appear on Virgin Media’s Gogglebox Ireland. Although before appearing on the show, Yemi admits she’d never even seen it before. The mum with children ranging in ages from 14 to 30, as well as grandchildren, wasn’t hugely keen on the idea of a reality style television show. However, when TV producers were looking for a migrant family to take part, the Adenuga’s name kept coming up again and again.
An integral part of the local community since they arrived, their good reputation was mainly down to Yemi’s eagerness to put down roots. “I volunteered for anything and everything and I think that’s how I became known. I was literally the first to put my hand up,” she recalls.
While Yemi may not have been initially keen on Gogglebox, the family gave it a go and were a huge hit with viewers. The validation meant a lot. “Especially as a migrant family, for me it spoke volumes about the kind of Ireland I would love to see where we stop using the word migrant at some stage for people who have lived here for years, and you start to feel like this is home.”
Home has been at the forefront of Yemi’s mind since first moving to Ireland in 2000. After living in Dublin for a few years, she headed to Navan and admits she fell in love with it. She was passionate about making this a solid base for her kids and to have the name Adenuga have a lasting connection to Navan. “If someone asks you where you’re from, often, they say ‘do you know the so-and-so’s from there?’ That’s where everything about your family is rooted from and that doesn’t happen by magic. If I was going to live in this town, I wanted to build a base for my kids. If people asked them, ‘where are you from?’ I wanted them to say, as new Irish people, who were born here, I’m from Navan.”
Yemi threw herself into community work, giving talks in schools and volunteering for all sorts of initiatives. It might sound like no surprise then that she decided to take a chance and run for office in 2019. But you’d be wrong. “When I was first asked to run for the council I said no,” she recalls. “I come originally from Nigeria, and I had this mindset of what politics is,” she says. “People don’t like politicians. Even in Ireland you hear people say things about politicians, so I didn’t want people to turn against me. I’d done too much good work to smear that.” However, after the Fine Gael National Secretary asked to meet her, Yemi realised much of what she was doing was already aligned with being a public representative. “I told him, look I don’t really know politics, but he said ‘you know people Yemi and that’s what we need.’”
The campaign was a daunting prospect, however. If she took the seat, she’d be making history as Ireland's first female black councillor and she’d be opening herself up to an even higher level of scrutiny. While her good work in the community stood to her, she met her fair share of negativity on the campaign trail. “I had a lot of doors slammed in my face and some people said things like ‘you’re taking our jobs and now you want to take over our politics’”. Yemi recalled one man in a shopping centre who questioned her basic intelligence. “Part of me thought he’s saying this because I’m a woman, but also you know what someone means by the way they say it. He asked me where I came from, do we speak English there and that my English was not bad. It was all so condescending,” she recalls. Keeping calm under pressure is one of Yemi’s strengths however and as someone who is led by her values, she puts a huge amount of weight in respect.
“Respect for me cuts two ways. First, I respect people regardless of whether they respect me back or not. That’s the power of respect. But of course, when someone like that man in the shopping centre becomes so condescending, my human instinct was to wrap him up in a ball and throw him against the wall,” she laughs. “That’s me being a human being,” she explains, “but because I have values, I stood there and let him finish and I said ‘well, we’ll see what people will say at the polls. And I hope they will see me worthy enough to serve them’. That was my answer to him and I walked away.”
The people did see her worthy enough and she was voted in in 2019. Since then, she’s felt the weight of exception and felt the pressure to represent not just Navan, but migrants too. “Sometimes I have to say ‘look I’m a local councillor representing the town of Navan, I’m not the Taoiseach’”. Watch this space however, as she has said she may run in the General Election next year.
Regardless of her political pathway, for Yemi the most important thing has been family and making a home and with the Adenuga’s now part of the fabric of Navan, she’s done that and so much more. WW
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