Opinion

Jim Gibney: A political and electoral revolution is underway

A jubilant Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire
A jubilant Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire A jubilant Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire

A political and electoral revolution is underway and the old regime of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, once rock-like, is balancing on one leg high-up on a wire with no safety net.

We look up in wonder with bated breath and anticipation of great things to come.

The stranglehold of partition flounders in the face of the people’s will as Sinn Féin upends the two-party state of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael just as it did in the north when it upended the one-party unionist state.

As I write we are still in the territory of speculation between RTÉ’s exit poll on Saturday night and the counting of votes and Mary Lou McDonald’s storming performance with two quotas and state-wide similar stories of Sinn Féin’s performance.

I first met the Sinn Féin surge when it was just a trickle and based on anecdote rather than the science of polling.

It was in the stories told to me by TDs in Dublin’s Mansion House at the launch of the party’s election campaign a few weeks ago, which seems like years ago now, given all that has happened in between.

All said nervously that ‘something different’ was happening on the doors but it would be foolish to rely on it - too early to be optimistic, to daring to be hopeful.

The caution was prudent given the poor results in previous elections.

But then there was the end-of-year remarkable election result in Dublin Mid-West, when Mark Ward won the seat ‘against the odds’, and a good performance in Cork North Central and decent results in two other areas.

The stories from the campaign launch reminded me of the stories coming out of the canvasses in Dublin Mid-West.

A harbinger of things to come, I wondered.

But it was the comments of Mayo’s Rose Conway Walsh that unsettled me in a good way.

Twenty years' experience as a community worker, a counsellor and a seanadóir convinced her that something fundamental, never seen before, was happening. She was meeting it everywhere she went in Mayo.

I witnessed it in Ballina and Castlebar with Rose and Niall Ó Donnaghaile, whom I work with in the Seanad.

It was on the doors in Letterkenny, in Fingal with Louise O Reilly TD, in Dundalk with candidate Ruairí Ó Murchú.

It was obvious in the smiling faces, in the greetings, in the willingness of people to take a leaflet and wish you well.

It was in the quivering voice of Ollie Armstrong, one of Rose’s canvassers, as we stood in front of the graves of hunger strikers Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg in Leigue Cemetery in Ballina and he reminded us of those dark days.

And of earlier times when a young IRA man from the village he was born in was tied to the back of a vehicle and dragged by the feet and shot dead by the Black and Tans outside the village.

The same forces that Fine Gael wanted a state ceremony to commemorate.

It was in the soft-spoken voice of Michael Fleming, a personal friend of Michael and Frank.

It was in the proud eight-year-old memory of an elderly man in Dundalk who told me that his father kept Fergal O'Hanlon and Sean South in their house in the 1950s.

It was in the grandmother who was minding her grandchildren so that her son and his wife could work to pay bills. They could not afford child care.

It was in the clarion message from Sinn Féin’s campaign team: Mary Lou, Pearse Doherty, Louise O Reilly, Eoin O Broin.

They provided solutions to partition; the housing and health service crisis; to pensioners who wanted to retire at 65; to the unfair tax system which did not tax banks or big corporations; to the rip-off insurance companies; to the unemployed and the poor and marginalised.

It was a ‘can do’, ‘must do’ message from Mary Lou for people thirsting for change.

As the good news flooded in from many sources I thought of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams and their generation, who helped make this day happen with their steadfast and visionary leadership.

Sinn Féin in government north and south is no longer a pipe dream.

Nor is a new and independent Ireland in what Mary Lou described as this new ‘decade of opportunity’.