I sat in the press gallery of the Dáil chamber last week when a vote on the position of taoiseach was about to be held.
I have been coming and going to Leinster House as a journalist since the days of Charlie Haughey and Garret FitzGerald and it was a constant feature of the place that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were the largest parties. Although I knew in detail prior to arrival on this occasion that Sinn Féin had become one of the “big beasts”, it was quite startling to see how much space they actually took up: row upon row of seats.
After the general election in 1997, FF came back with 77 TDs, FG had 54, and there was only one solitary Sinn Féin representative, Caoimhghin Ó Caoláin from Cavan-Monaghan. SF went up to five in 2002 but dropped back to four in 2007. Things didn’t look good and those republicans who had opposed giving up the policy of abstentionism from the Dáil must have felt a sense of vindication. However, there was a better result in 2011, with 14 seats, and that increased to 23 in the next big outing at the ballot-box in 2016.
A year earlier, in October 2015, a book of mine was launched with the title ‘Power Play: The rise of modern Sinn Féin’. More recently, it seemed that “rise and fall” might be a more appropriate form of words. The party had what a civil servant in ‘Yes Minister’ might tactfully call “rather mixed” results in elections for President of Ireland, the European Parliament, local councils and Westminster.
Things began to look a little better when four Dáil by-elections took place last November. I’m not much of a gambler but a senior figure in SF advised me to put money on Independent candidate Paul Gogarty to take the seat in Dublin Mid-West. Luckily I kept my hand in my pocket because, on the day, Sinn Féin’s Mark Ward won quite comfortably.
The party also came a strong second in Cork North-Central, but most of the talk was about Fine Gael’s failure to fill any of the four vacancies. When a general election was announced for February 8 it looked initially as if Sinn Féin’s performance would be solid but not spectacular. It was only as we approached the final week of the campaign that opinion polls indicated SF was going to do extremely well and would do even better if it was running more candidates, but nominations had closed at that stage.
The basic reason for the party’s strong showing is that it tapped into the sense of injustice that many voters feel at present. The Republic of Ireland is a very unequal society in some respects. On the table as I write I can see newspaper advertisements offering houses for sale at prices ranging almost as high as €5million (£4million-plus in sterling) but in downtown Dublin tonight there will be homeless people in sleeping-bags sheltering from the wind and rain: I recently counted five of them in the same corner. Meanwhile, one hears of older people whose sole income is the state pension taking to their beds to keep warm because they can’t afford sufficient heating.
However, at this point in time – an important qualification - it doesn’t look as if any of Sinn Féin’s 37 TDs are going to be at the cabinet-table in the next government. There is much talk of a coalition or some other arrangement involving 37 Fianna Fáil deputies, 35 from Fine Gael and 12 from the Green Party, which would surpass the minimum figure of 80 required for a Dáil majority. A cluster of Independents might also be included, along with or instead of the Greens.
Sinn Féin has embarked on a series of public rallies in Cork, Dublin, Newry, Cavan and Galway, drawing attention to its exclusion by FF and FG. Gaffes on the part of SF representatives are getting a lot of media coverage and questions are also being raised about the Provisional IRA – has it gone away or is it running the show from behind the scenes? The coming weeks are going to be rough and tough, but interesting and even entertaining for spectators.
Email: Ddebre1@aol.com; Twitter: @DdeBreadun
