Why is the one-time party of the IRA winning popularity in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland?
Back in the mid-1990s, curious to understand the “cult” of violent Irish republicanism, I attended a meeting of the Sinn Féin party in the backroom of a dingy west of Ireland pub. Tattooed young men stood guard at the door as I entered, the walls festooned with “Brits Out” posters and tricolour flags. A portly woman passed around ham and cheese sandwiches while a bearded man made a barely audible speech, punctuated by a smattering of applause. It felt more like a meeting of the local council than of ruthless revolutionaries, determined to “liberate” the north.
At the time, Sinn Féin was polling at less than 2 per cent in the Republic of Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement was still a distant dream. No sane political commentator could have predicted that 25 years later these political pariahs would have become the largest party in the country, on the cusp of taking power on both sides of the Irish border. The “Shinners”, as they are often dubbed, are already in office in Northern Ireland and a Sinn Féin-led government is the most likely outcome of the imminent general election in the Republic.
How did we get here? In many ways, it is the story of twin evolutions – of the Sinn Féin party and of wider Irish society – beginning with the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The mid-1990s also saw the beginning of a social and economic revolution that would transform Ireland from an impoverished theocracy into a booming capitalist democracy (the 2008 crash notwithstanding). It was this transformation that created the liberal, ethnically diverse, post-Troubles generation upon which Sinn Féin’s hopes of taking power in the Irish Republic now largely rest.
In a profoundly changed Ireland, can Sinn Féin shake off its dubious past? And what might be the implications for the island’s political future if the party takes power on both sides of the border?
A careful balancing act
Despite almost a century of political and social domination by the Catholic Church, it can now be difficult to remember just how conservative the Irish Republic once was. Legendary Irish gay rights campaigner David Norris had to battle the state all the way to the European Court of Human Rights before homosexuality was reluctantly decriminalised in 1993 (compared to 1967 in England), while the entrenched power of the Church was enough to defeat the 1986 referendum on divorce, which would remain illegal for another 10 years. Liberalisation, slow and halting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, accelerated rapidly in the 2010s, with the advent of marriage equality and the legalisation of abortion.
The evolution of Sinn Féin in the Republic of Ireland has followed a curiously similar trajectory. In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the party set about the task of dominating politics on both parts of the island. In the north Sinn Féin was already a significant political force, and the end of the IRA’s campaign helped the party to grow rapidly under the leadership of Martin McGuinness. Meanwhile, Gerry Adams, venturing south to build on the party’s meagre support base, faced significant obstacles in the Republic. By the late 1990s, the so-called Celtic Tiger economic revolution of tax cuts and deregulation was already in full swing, making Sinn Féin’s brand of neo-Marxist economics a very hard sell.
The Troubles were also fresh in the memories of a southern electorate that had always rejected an IRA campaign that was very much personified by Adams and McGuinness. Both politicians had been temporarily banned from the peace talks for two brutal murders attributed to the IRA. For Irish people of a certain age such atrocities formed the macabre soundtrack of childhood, an endless cycle of brutal violence splashed across our TV screens night after night.
But Adams, a veteran of the long game, was not to be deterred. He ditched the elbow-patched corduroy jacket for an Armani suit, and set about reinventing Sinn Féin by distancing the party from the IRA, while never explicitly disavowing the “armed struggle”. It was a delicate balancing act born of the party’s need to appeal to two increasingly distinct electorates at once: in Northern Ireland, where Catholicism and nationalism remained indispensable tools of resistance, and in a Republic that was slowly abandoning religion and ideology for material prosperity.
Over time, the party tempered its Eurosceptic tendencies, moved slowly to the centre on economics and played down the national question in favour of bread-and-butter issues, such as housing and health. According to Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern history at University College Dublin, this was very much in keeping with the long-standing pragmatism of Adams, who “had qualified the republicans’ purist positions at various junctures from the 1980s onwards”, including their acceptance of the existence of Northern Ireland as an unpalatable but fixed reality, at least in the medium term.
Adams also began to recruit and promote a new crop of southern Sinn Féin activists with no direct involvement in the Troubles, the most notable of whom was an articulate and ambitious young woman called Mary Lou McDonald. Born in the leafy south county Dublin suburb of Churchtown, the middle-class, university-educated McDonald could hardly be further removed from the “cordite and corduroy” image of the traditional Sinn Féin politician – the perfect poster girl for the aspirational post-Troubles generation. She rose quickly through the party ranks, becoming deputy leader in 2009. When Adams finally retired in 2018 after 37 years at the helm of the party, McDonald was anointed leader.
McDonald has continued the Adams strategy of “playing down the paramilitary legacy but without irking the republican base”, as Deaglán de Bréadún, author of Power Play: The Rise of Modern Sinn Féin, succinctly describes it. It is a balancing act that is also reflected in the party’s choice of leaders. While McDonald leads Sinn Féin in the south, partly because she has no republican baggage, in the north Michelle O’Neill succeeded Martin McGuinness precisely because she does: her father is a former republican prisoner and Sinn Féin councillor. In February this year, after two years of political stalemate over post-Brexit trading rules, O’Neill was finally elected as First Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly. She is the first nationalist leader in the hundred-year history of a statelet specifically designed to create a permanent unionist majority.
Following the shock resignation of the Republic’s prime minister in March, Sinn Féin have called for immediate elections, which must legally take place before March of next year. If they do win power, it will have more to do with the impact of the crash on the post-Troubles generation than any of its leadership or policy changes.
The financial crisis had a profound effect on the younger generation, which had come of age in a time of unprecedented prosperity. The dark tales of mass unemployment and forced emigration in the 1980s again became its lived reality. Though in macroeconomic terms Ireland recovered quickly from the crisis, as the 2010s wore on, the long-term collateral social damage became ever clearer, particularly in the area of housing.
Far and away the defining issue of Irish politics, the country’s chronic housing shortage is a legacy of both boom and bust. The result is a highly dysfunctional housing market, a dearth of affordable housing and a massively inflated private rental sector. Video clips of students and young professionals queuing down the street for the mere glimpse of a property have become the stuff of social media, and crashing on friends’ couches or sleeping in cars the new norm.
Sinn Féin deftly harnessed massive social discontent on the issue which was key to it winning the biggest share of the vote, though not quite the most seats, in the 2020 general election – a result that Ferriter attributes to “greater success with middle-class and affluent voters”, as the effects of crises in housing and health began to be felt far beyond Sinn Féin’s working-class heartlands.
Upcoming elections
The next 10 months will see Irish voters go to the polls in European, local and general elections. Sinn Féin can reasonably expect to come out on top in all three. Its margin of victory in the last of these, which will determine whether Mary Lou McDonald becomes the Republic’s first female prime minister, rests on turning out the votes of the post-Troubles generation with whom Sinn Féin enjoys record support.
In 2020 the two establishment parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, joined forces to deny Sinn Féin power. Having failed to effectively tackle the crises in housing and health over the last four years, they will likely now resort to highlighting Sinn Féin’s murky paramilitary-linked past. Though it is a tactic that has been successfully deployed before, the next election will sorely test its effectiveness as a political tool, especially among younger voters.
Sinn Féin’s Mark Ward was elected to parliament in the 2020 surge, one of a new breed of young, articulate representatives that are beginning to dominate the parliamentary party. In his view, Sinn Féin’s past is increasingly an irrelevance. “When we went knocking on the doors it [the Troubles] didn’t come up,” he replies when asked about the issues raised by voters in his Dublin Mid-West constituency. “People have moved on. What concerned them was … housing, health, having less money in your pocket at the end of the week.” More objective observers than Ward share that assessment, including Kevin Cunningham, a former targeting and analysis manager for the UK Labour Party and now a lecturer in politics at Technological University Dublin. “Sinn Féin will obviously be dealing with the legacies from the Troubles which crop up every so often, but it doesn’t seem to dent their momentum, which suggests that this change is generational,” he says.
One recent controversy seemed to underline this generational shift. In late 2022 a video of the Republic of Ireland women’s football team celebrating qualification for their first ever World Cup by singing “Celtic Symphony” by Irish traditional music group the Wolfe Tones went instantly viral. Though the song references the IRA in the line “ooh ah up the RA, say ooh ah up the RA”, it is hard to believe that a dressing-room rendition by a team of 20-something sportswomen had any real political context, particularly given the song’s long association with football. As de Bréadún explains, “The past is always present … but officially the IRA hasn’t been active since 1997. That’s almost 30 years. A lot of voters wouldn’t have been born then,” or were too young to have any clear recollection of it now.
The election is still up for grabs. The issue of immigration rose quickly up the political agenda following the far right-inspired riots in Dublin last November and Sinn Féin has struggled to articulate a position that satisfies both its liberal and more conservative wings. Though this has given a glimmer of hope to the establishment parties it is likely to be a forlorn one. Sinn Féin remains confident that the post-Troubles generation’s pent-up desire for change, any change, from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – the “tweedledum and tweedledee” of Irish politics who have governed the country between them for more than 100 years – will be enough to carry the party over the line.
The pursuit of power in both jurisdictions is a means to a much-coveted end for Sinn Féin: acquiring the requisite political clout to push for a border poll on unification. Once in power in the Republic, the party will have no qualms about advocating for constitutional change and laying the groundwork for a potential transition to unity, something that previous Irish governments have shied away from for fear of antagonising unionism. Though support expressed in opinion polls and at the ballot box does not yet meet the threshold set out in the Good Friday Agreement for the holding of a border poll, Sinn Féin takes inspiration from how the Scottish Nationalists, though ultimately unsuccessful, grew support for independence in the years preceding the 2015 referendum – an achievement partly facilitated by having their hands on the levers of government.
For most of the 20th century, the notion that a majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens would opt to leave the relative wealth of the UK to merge with the impoverished Republic was considered risible on both sides of the border. However, with the economic and social transformation of the south, demographic change in the north that has seen Catholics outnumber Protestants through higher birth rates, and the immense upheavals of Brexit which Northern Ireland voters roundly rejected, Irish unity has now become at least a plausible medium-term ambition. And with a determined and disciplined Sinn Féin aggressively pulling the levers of power on both sides of the Irish border, it is an ambition that might well be achieved sooner than anyone currently imagines.
This article is from New Humanist’s summer 2024 issue. Subscribe now.
