Opinion

Brian Feeney: Fianna Fail need to learn that treating Sinn Féin as pariahs simply will not work

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;; ">Fianna F&aacute;il and Fine Gael may soon conclude that a second election could see Mary Lou McDonald's Sinn F&eacute;in perform even better</span>
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael may soon conclude that a second election could see Mary Lou McDonald's Sinn Féin perform even better Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael may soon conclude that a second election could see Mary Lou McDonald's Sinn Féin perform even better

The late Bishop Edward Daly believed that after the ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement people who had been in politics through the Troubles should retire.

He reckoned they were too old to learn the new vocabulary and attitudes required by and for the peace process.

By 2007 when the Troubles were manifestly over, symbolised by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley sitting for a photo-call, not quite beside each other at artfully angled tables, the politics of the previous generation were over. Sinn Féin and the DUP had arrived.

The leading figures of the other parties, mainly UUP and SDLP, never lost their resentment and sense of entitlement. They just couldn’t get their heads round what had happened. Even with a new generation of leaders they continued, and to this day still do, to throw mud at both Sinn Féin and the DUP – ‘problem parties’ hah – using the same vocabulary as the 1970s and 1980s and incredibly, still accusing them of the same sins they were guilty of decades ago.

UUP and SDLP could never be reconciled with the fact that the electorate had spoken repeatedly, and repeatedly rejected them. They never learned the new vocabulary and attitudes Bishop Daly thought essential for the new political dispensation. For the SDLP and UUP it’s as if politics stopped sometime in the 1980s with the DUP and Sinn Féin joint bogeymen.

So much has happened since then. Small items like the collapse of communism, the unification of Germany and the accession of former Soviet satellite states to membership of the EU. Yet the mindset of some politicians here remains set in thirty year old concrete. Still, the mindset is not confined to the north. Bishop Daly’s views apply with even more relevance to the south where Micheál Martin has talked himself into a corner exemplified by his badly judged speech in the Dáil attacking Sinn Féin and Mary Lou McDonald after she became the first person in history to gain more votes for taoiseach than a Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael nominee.

Martin’s reward for using the language of thirty year old politics? Two opinion polls, one from Amárach.ie and one from the Sunday Times, both showing FF down by two percentage points while SF surged an unprecedented 10 per cent. Panic has set in among some of his TDs, especially those outside Dublin. They know disaster looms if there’s another election. They know disaster looms if they go into coalition with FG. Martin, shell-shocked by his own result in Cork South Central, sounded accommodating to SF at his count. He was bounced into reverse by Jim O’Callaghan TD for salubrious, wealthy Dublin Bay South, brother of Miriam of RTÉ fame. O’Callaghan knows his well-heeled voters would kick him out if FF even contemplated a deal with SF. So Martin, confronted by O’Callaghan and other fearful TDs from wealthy constituencies, swung back to his super-hard line.

Which brings us to another unsavoury, unspoken aspect to all this. It’s a class issue, north and south. Remember Trimble talking about the need to ‘house train’ SF? For some FF and FG people too, Sinn Féin represent the great unwashed, the barbarians at the gates. They won’t admit it, but as Mary Lou said, they’re telling SF voters that, ‘they singularly and in perpetuity must sit on the sidelines’.

Those opinion polls have now spooked a set of FF TDs who believe Martin must make a deal with SF, now the largest party in Ireland with the most popular party leader. They insist Martin can’t keep talking as if it’s 1997 when he first became a minister, droning on about SF not being a normal party. Voters don’t buy it: support for SF continues to grow. Voters believe castigating SF about the past is an excuse to avoid the issues SF has identified as urgent, like health and housing, which voters don’t believe FF will deal with, much less FF/FG.