Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Might cheek be Sinn Féin's biggest handicap?

Deputy first Minister and Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O'Neill. Photo: Liam McBurney/PA Wire.
Deputy first Minister and Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O'Neill. Photo: Liam McBurney/PA Wire. Deputy first Minister and Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O'Neill. Photo: Liam McBurney/PA Wire.

The year ends with today’s made-over republicans close to political dominance north and south. Cheek has taken them a long way. Might it now be their biggest handicap?

Across the water Conservatives are gunked by the swing in Owen Paterson’s old seat. Covid-handling and cheek turned voters off, coaxed some to vote tactically. In the south near-panic licks around once-dominant parties reduced to coalition. It’s easy to dismiss as spite the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil accusation of inconsistency between Dáil and Stormont. Easy, because southern voters barely notice.

Voters in the Republic may lift SF over the line with a dollop of hope, and to slap ‘the others’ for the failings of southern society. The thought of taking the DUP and unionism down by putting Sinn Féin into first place in the north mutes doubts and dislike, of both SF and Stormont. Though there is plenty of both.

The north is quick to spot cheek. Voters schooled in loyalty and loathing can ignore it. There was more northern interest in SF TDs differing about that Gerry Adams video, than in the video itself. On the other hand Michelle O’Neill’s ‘I am the vice-president of the party and I think that’s enough said’ raised hackles. Only the most faithful buy ‘Michelle’ as a leader who must not be questioned.

Adams quirkiness on top of those cringy Santa presents; that won’t count on polling day. But dislike for Sinn Féin manoeuvring in Stormont is sharp among other anti-unionist parties – voiced best by campaigners for the right to choose, Greens, People before Profit, an outspoken SDLP woman and others this past week. PBP’s Gerry Carroll said pro-choice activists had built ‘massive pressure on SF to change their position.’ The whipped SF block came through in the end, to make the difference, beat the unionists, crow a bit.

O’Neill went into overdrive to claim defeat for the DUP ‘strategy designed to block abortion services’ and to announce SF’s intent to present their own motion and seek cross-party support for it. This was the ‘moment to draw the line’ against ‘women being exiled abroad’. Exactly what campaigners said SF had been enabling. The accusation is that by abstaining in an earlier vote and in Stormont’s health committee republicans encouraged unionists to continue blocking abortion provision.

O’Neill’s rhetoric condemning unionists included a ringing: ‘The women of the north see you and the women in your communities see you.’ Ooh, sauce. That’s the very accusation pro-choice campaigners have been levelling at O’Neill and her colleagues, for failing to live up to her boast with Mary Lou McDonald of ‘The North is Next.’

In the 24 hours after the debate she also had traditional indignation to vent on the British Supreme Court ruling supporting ‘the Hooded Men’; it was now time for the PSNI to ‘do their job.’ But doubters wonder what SF have been doing on the policing board while the PSNI, increasingly Protestant, arrest twice as many Catholics as Protestants.

The question is what ‘cuts through’ to the general population, the phrase much used in London of moments when people take notice and cannot be fooled. In big, diverse Britain, its health service and poorest people battered by the pandemic, little wonder that many fail to recognise those Covid-related contracts for ministerial friends and Tory party donors without proper or sometimes any oversight. Boozy parties in Number Ten, though, parties that so flagrantly broke the rules have certainly ‘cut through’.

When SF MLAs backed hunting with dogs there was some bafflement. Hasn’t Mary Lou been forthrightly anti-hunting? But then didn’t a recent poll find SF tops with every social sector in the Republic except farmers, and killing foxes counts in the countryside. A Co Down man wrote to this paper that with dogs ‘the kill’ was instant or the fox escaped ‘to live another day.’

Like SF, a 32-county party of endless flexibility.