The Enigma of Sinn Féin
There is no enigma, they're not a left-wing party. Why pretend otherwise?
Sinn Féin announced their departure from progressive politics last week first with a dog whistle and then with an alarm bell.
Mary Lou McDonald’s praise for “The Lads With The Tractors,'“ and assertion that their blockade of O’Connell Street made women feel safer announced the party’s determination to throw its lot with the fuel protesters.
Her sunny portrait of the protest weekend contrasted with the experience of the Muslim Sisters of Éire group which has for years been providing meals for homeless people in O’Connell Street. The Muslim Sisters endured the nightmare of being attacked by racists who’d arrived in the area to support the protests.
Challenged on this point during an interview by Gavin Reilly on Virgin Media the Sinn Féin leader blithely declared that “everybody knows,” these activists were a small minority. She repeated her line about, “The Lads With The Tractors,” (a phrase obviously considered to have box office potential), making the city safer.
These are questionable assertions. The protests shouldn’t be characterised as far right. They’re driven by discontent about rising fuel prices. Yet their two most high profile leaders James Geoghegan and John Dallon were scheduled to appear at an event (subsequently cancelled) alongside far right Dublin councillor Gavin Pepper who has, among other things, called for mass deportations of immigrants.
After McDonald’s Virgin Media interview Pepper agreed with her comments on the programme’s Facebook page. Immediately below his posts was one which read, “Hardly a foreignor (sic) in sight. Couldn’t believe it was Dublin.”
Misspelt though the post might have been, it did capture an essential point about O’Connell Street during the protests. It wasn’t a welcoming place for immigrants. The Muslim Sisters of Éire’s experience showed that.
So when a political leader praises the “safety” of the city that weekend they are, perhaps inadvertently, betraying their belief about whose safety really matters to them.
Further evidence of Sinn Féin’s attitude on such matters arrived the day after McDonald’s interview. The government’s announcement that it would stop providing accommodation for Ukrainian refugees was criticised by both Labour and the Social Democrats as well by the Irish Refugee Council.
Sinn Féin on the other hand didn’t just welcome the decision, its deputy leader Pearse Doherty criticised the government for not taking it sooner and said the party had been pressing for this move for some time.
The sight of the government, Sinn Féin, Aontú and Independent Ireland on one side with Labour and the Social Democrats on the other was a pretty stark illustration of the differences between the parties on immigration. Sinn Féin is making common cause with parties of the right rather than those of the centre-left.
This isn’t particularly surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention. Last year party Justice spokesman Matt Carthy criticised government policy over IPAS refugee accommodation centres for ignoring “genuine concerns” in communities and said the party, “hadn’t been vocal enough on migration.”
That kind of rhetoric made it clear that Sinn Féin was keen to adopt what it described as a more “common sense” view of immigration. In doing so the leadership may have been reflecting the opinion of the party at grass roots level.
Several of the party’s local representatives have supported protests against immigrant accommodation, Roscommon TD Claire Kerrane called (in a subsequently deleted Facebook post) for immigrants who commit crimes to be deported. Tipperary TD Martin Browne addressed a meeting in Roscrea protesting against asylum seekers being housed there.
In polls Sinn Féin tends to have the highest percentage of voters with a negative view of immigration. So perhaps there’s nothing remarkable about the party adopting positions which are closer to that of Independent Ireland than to those of the Social Democrats. The rightward shift on the issue also mirrors that of the two government parties.
What is remarkable is the attitude of Sinn Féin’s putative partners in a left-wing coalition, the Social Democrats, Labour and People Before Profit. It’s not so much that they refuse to criticise the party’s position on immigration, it’s that they’re pretending not to notice it.
Some outside apologists affect to believe that there’s “a battle for the soul of the party” going on within Sinn Féin. But there’s little evidence of dissent within the party over the new hard line on immigration.
The more common defence of tiptoeing around Sinn Féin on the matter, occasionally spoken but more often left unsaid, is that such differences should be swept under the carpet in the interests of coalition building.
This is a venerable line on the Irish Left, one used by Labour traditionally and the Green Party of late, to justify the selling out of core values while in government with either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.
Such compromises, usually defended on the grounds of “realism”, have generally proved disastrous for the parties involved and resulted in their decimation at the following general election. But the victims of such catastrophes could at least point to getting some, if not much, legislation passed. They also got to ride around in state cars for a bit.
By contrast, the centre-left’s current caution around Sinn Féin seems to give them the worst of both worlds, responsibility without power. The Social Democrats and Labour are behaving like the junior partners in a coalition which only exists in their minds.
There were hopes that it might exist in reality when the opposition parties were drawn closer together by the government’s high-handed treatment at the opening of the current Dáil. It appeared as though Irish politics was finally moving towards a right-left divide.
Such hopes have been comprehensively scotched over the past week. The fuel protesters, essentially a movement of self-interested small businessmen, are unlikely allies for a left-wing party. Talk of socialist unity rings hollow when Sinn Féin are lining up alongside Aontú and Independent Ireland.
The appetite for self-delusion is understandable. An alliance with Sinn Féin held out the opportunity of creating a broadly left-wing government for the first time in the history of the state. You could argue that such an unprecedented prospect justifies a certain degree of sacrifice.
But this sacrifice will probably be for nothing. It seems increasingly obvious that Sinn Féin’s sights are set on a coalition with Fianna Fáil, preferably as senior partner.
A partnership with one large party rather than three or four smaller ones would be pragmatically preferable for Sinn Féin. It might also be temperamentally preferable.
I don’t mean to insult Sinn Féin by casting doubt on their left-wing credentials. It’s merely a statement of observable political fact. Most politicians in Ireland like to be considered more left-wing than they are (and even the right-wing ones hate being called right-wing.)
A classic example of this was Bertie Ahern’s claim to be a “socialist,” which he justified in the terms, he liked to see business booming so money could trickle down to the less well off, of classic Reaganism.
Sinn Féin is not traditionally left-wing. The current party descends from the Provisional group which split from Official Sinn Féin because it disapproved of the latter’s left-wing turn. The phrase, “Godless Communism,” saw some use at the time.
The republican movement did turn to the left in the eighties when a younger leadership cohort from the North, developed an interest in Marxism. Its councillors in the Republic tended to represent working class areas so marginalised that the idea of Sinn Féin as “enemies of the state” was seen as a recommendation rather than a drawback.
It remains strong in those areas and its policies on housing and health are to the left of the two main parties. But it’s worth remembering that the party’s main priority is a United Ireland and that everything else is largely a means to that end. Criticisms of the party for being unprincipled might meet with the counter-argument that the big prize of a United Ireland is surely worth an odd bit of Machiavellianism.
Sinn Féin’s ambition is not to become the leading party of the Irish Left. It is to become in the Republic what it is in the North, a dominant catch-all party. It is to become the new Fianna Fáil.
To do that it must get into government. Just four years ago, with the party at 36% in the polls, Mary Lou’s accession to the Taoiseach’s office seemed an inevitability. Yet when the election the party had longed for finally arrived in 2024 the party’s support had slumped. So much so that it celebrated its 19% vote share as a gallant fightback.
Conventional wisdom says there’s a ceiling to Sinn Féin’s vote because some voters can’t forgive it for being the de facto political wing of the IRA during the Troubles. That didn’t stop the party attaining the 36% figure in 2022. It seems odd that Sinn Féin aren’t coming anywhere near that figure at the moment, given the rank incompetence and cynicism of a hugely unpopular government.
The party’s biggest problem may actually be the perception that it’s willing to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in search of public approval. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Sinn Fein used to be regarded as more principled than the two main parties.
Its perceived idealism was a big part of its appeal. Even the refusal to disown the more sulphurous elements of its past could be seen in those terms. Sinn Féin was the party whose TDs took the average industrial wage and remitted the rest to the party. You knew where you stood with them.
No more. It’s telling that whenever we discuss Sinn Féin these days we presume their policy is driven by expediency rather than principle. We proceed from the belief that they’ll be guided by their perception of what will play well with the electorate.
That would explain the embrace of the fuel protests and the new line on immigration. Other straws are blowing in the wind. Health spokesperson’s David Cullinane’s welcome on social media of a UK court ruling that men and women must be defined by their biological sex was an example.
Cullinane’s apology for any offence given to trans people seemed very new model Sinn Fein. There’s a lot of walking back after you get the benefit of putting an idea out there. These days Sinn Féin seems shifty. In a very Fianna Fáil way.
Sinn Féin’s move to the right risks alienating younger progressive voters. That’s where the alliance in the Dáil with the Progressive Democrats, Labour and People Before Profit comes in handy. As long as these parties refrain from criticising Sinn Fein it can maintain the fiction of being left-wing. Their main use is not as allies but as camouflage.
The irony is that the reluctance of these parties to challenge Sinn Féin ultimately makes its move towards Fianna Fáil more likely. Sinn Féin might have more respect for the Social Democrats and Labour if those parties started winning enough of the younger vote it takes for granted to become serious rivals. By pretending Sinn Féin aren’t moving right, its centre-left allies are enabling and perhaps even exacerbating the process.
Another irony is that the populist line on immigration may not even be that popular. A survey last week found that belief in the positive effects of immigration has actually risen from 64% to 66% over the past year. Could it be that the main parties have misjudged public opinion by placing too much emphasis on the view of a noisy minority which is over-represented on social media?
If that is the case, who’s going to represent the 66%? Not Sinn Fein apparently. The next election promises to be a race to the bottom on immigration. Mary Lou and her Merry Lads seem determined to win it.