LITMIR.BIZ

      1. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT SINN FÉIN...

      ‘Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?’ (Bob Dylan)

      THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE, including members of other political organisations, who don’t want to give Sinn Féin a mention, at least not in any way that might allow the party a competitive advantage. Some of them are adherents of Leon Trotsky, but even they would have to acknowledge the truth of their master’s dictum: ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’

      Except, of course, that Sinn Féin is no longer at war. Or rather, it is no longer the propaganda voice of the ‘armed struggle’ carried out by the Provisional IRA. That campaign is over, according to the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), established by the British and Irish Governments as part of the peace process. When I asked the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána (‘Guardians of the Peace’), the Republic of Ireland’s police force, Nóirín O’Sullivan, on 24 April 2015, if the IMC assessment was still valid, she replied: ‘Absolutely. The report of the International Monitoring Commission, that still stands. They reported that the paramilitary structures of the IRA had been dismantled.’ Speaking in Dublin to the Association of European Journalists, Commissioner O’Sullivan added that individuals, ‘who would have previously had paramilitary connections’, were currently involved in criminal activity, especially along the border between the two parts of the island. The Commissioner was echoing the words of the IMC. It stated, in its 19th report, issued in September 2008: ‘Has PIRA abandoned its terrorist structures, preparations and capability? We believe that it has.’ Following two Belfast murders in the summer of 2015 the Commissioner was asked to review the situation for the Government (see also Epilogue).

      While the IRA, or individual members, may still allegedly strike out on occasion, the ‘Long War’, as the Provisionals called it, is officially over. As a result, Sinn Féin has gone from being the Provos’ brass band, to becoming a key player in mainstream politics, north and south. Since 1999, with a gap of a few years, Sinn Féin ministers have been part of the power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland. For the last eight years, as the second-largest party in the Stormont Assembly, Sinn Féin has held the post of Deputy First Minister, in the person of former IRA leader Martin McGuinness.

      South of the border it is, at time of writing, the second-largestparty in opposition, with 14 out of 166 members in Dáil Éireann, and three Senators from a total of 60 in the Upper House. This significant but still-modest representation is expected to increase considerably in the next general election, due to be held by 9 April 2016 at the latest. At least, this is what opinion polls have been suggesting for some time. In the last general election, held on 25 February 2011, the party secured 9.9 per cent of first preference votes, under the Irish system of proportional representation. But as it became clear in succeeding months that the new Fine Gael-Labour coalition was implementing similar austerity policies to its Fianna Fáil-led predecessor, elements of public opinion began to move towards the ‘Shinners’. The average for nine polls conducted by four different companies in the first four months of 2015, for example, was 21.5 per cent.(May to mid-September average is 19.1 per cent.)

      This compares with 25 per cent over the same period for the main government party, Fine Gael; 18.3 per cent for the chief opposition party, Fianna Fáil; eight per cent for minority coalition partner, Labour; and 26 per cent for ‘Others’ – which includes independents and smaller parties. Indeed one poll, conducted by the Millward Brown company and published in the Sunday Independent in mid-February 2015, had Sinn Féin as the most popular party at 26 per cent, one point ahead of Fine Gael. An Ipsos MRBI poll in theIrish Times in late March had the two parties level, at 24 per cent. The average percentages for May-July were: Fine Gael at 26.25; Fianna Fáil at 20.25; Sinn Féin at 19.5; Labour at 7.75; Others at 26.25.

      The biggest casualty has been the Labour Party, which scored 19.5 per cent in February 2011 after a feisty election campaign, based on pledges to resist the bail-out terms imposed by the ‘Troika’ of the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank (ECB), following the collapse of the Irish banking system in 2008.

      The Labour Party leader at the time, Eamon Gilmore, famously said, in relation to the strictures of the ECB on Ireland, that voters had a choice between ‘Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way’. Labour even deployed the slogan ‘Gilmore for Taoiseach’ during the election, but ended up as the ‘mudguard’ of the next government – it was to be Frankfurt’s way after all. Two polls at the end of 2014 had Labour at a startling five per cent although the position of the party improved over the following four months.

      Poll ratings are not always reflected at the ballot-box. You need the organisational structure ‘on the ground’, and people who respond to pollsters don’t always bother to cast their votes, or may not even be registered to vote. Fianna Fáil got 25.3 per cent support in the 2014 local elections although its average opinion poll ratings had not improved to that extent on the 17.45 per cent that the party received at the ballot-box in 2011. Sinn Féin’s performance in the ‘locals’, in contrast, was below what the opinion surveys had indicated.The party nevertheless did well in the same day’s European Parliament elections, where grassroots organisation was somewhat less important.1

      Sinn Féin is subject to an unrelenting stream – richly deserved, according to the party’s critics – of negative publicity and unfavourable media coverage, which is mainly related to the behaviour of some IRA members in the past, and how it was dealt with by the movement. But this didn’t seem to inflict any long-term damage: Sinn Féin kept bouncing back. Commenting on the phenomenon in the Sunday Business Post of 26 April 2015, Pat Leahy called Sinn Féin the undeniable ‘coming force in Irish politics’, as shown by the previous two years of polling research. In the same edition of that newspaper, Richard Colwell of the Red C polling company commented upon Sinn Féin’s ability to ‘swat away losses on the back of any controversy just a month later’. He referred to the 4 per cent loss endured by the party ‘on the back of a significant controversy surrounding its handling of alleged sex abusers within its ranks’. That was in the Red C poll published on 28 March but, just a month later, that support returned, leaving Sinn Féin with 22 per cent of the first preference vote. (However, a Red C poll in the 13 September Sunday Business Post had Sinn Féin at 16 per cent.)

      Just as

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