Opinion

Alex Kane: Why Sinn Féin just keeps growing

Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald with vice-president Michelle O'Neill at the assembly election count in Belfast last month
Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald with vice-president Michelle O'Neill at the assembly election count in Belfast last month Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald with vice-president Michelle O'Neill at the assembly election count in Belfast last month

IN about six months’ time – assuming their pre-cooked arrangements go to plan – Micheál Martin will step down in favour of Leo Varadkar.

Which may explain why Fine Gael has compiled a ‘secret’ dossier, entitled Sinn Fein Hypocrisy, which has gathered together all of the party’s inconsistent stances (on both sides of the border, for good measure); criticisms of its ‘disingenuous’ economic policies; and conflicting messages and comments from Sinn Féin members on, from what I understand, just about anything that comes to mind.

The dossier also draws comparisons between Sinn Féin and Donald Trump, likening the ‘massive political rally and oration for the Bobby Storey funeral in the middle of the pandemic’ to when Trump ‘lied to the American public and put lives at risk by organising large, super-spreader campaign rallies during Covid’. To be honest the whole thing smacks of desperation.

One thing the party’s political opponents should have learned by now is that throwing everything you have at Sinn Féin, including the kitchen sink, doesn’t seem to dent its electoral growth. In the past three years it has, just like Topsy, ‘growed and growed’.

The voters it is targeting, particularly the young, the working class and even the sort of middle-class demographic it tapped into in Northern Ireland, don’t seem fazed by its links with the IRA: and that’s because they believe the links are in the past. They believe Sinn Féin has decommissioned the paramilitary wing, the weapons and the old way of doing political business.

So, if Fine Gael – and all the other parties, north and south – are going to land a blow on Sinn Féin, then they will have to get much better at the deconstruction of its policies and platforms. The party’s vote has grown because it is clearly offering something which the other parties aren’t.

The SDLP, for instance, which did all of the key work necessary for sealing the Good Friday Agreement with the UUP, was subsequently destroyed by Sinn Féin. John Hume and others may have persuaded themselves that huge sections of the SDLP base were merely ‘lending’ their votes to encourage Sinn Féin along the democratic path; but the reality was that those voters were shifting for deeper, lasting reasons.

And the same will be true south of the border, too. To win back votes you have lost requires an understanding of why they were lost in the first place. In other words, understanding what it was about your own policies, people and legacy which suddenly proved unattractive to voters who had stayed loyal to you election after election.

In the case of the SDLP I think the losses were down to their core vote believing Hume et al had taken the nationalist cause as far as they could in 1998; so, they turned to Sinn Fein to take it to the next stage.

In the UUP’s case the losses seemed more to do with the fact that their core vote believed Trimble had gone too far, too fast, so they shifted to the DUP to slow down rather than speed up progress.

Fianna Fáil, always seen as the more unity-orientated of the southern political elite, was always going to take the biggest hit if Sinn Féin finally made the electoral breakthrough which had eluded it under Gerry Adams.

Ironically, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael reacted to Sinn Féin’s rise in precisely the same way the SDLP did. They viewed it as a blip which would correct itself once their wandering voters had ‘seen through’ Sinn Féin and returned to their senses.

But, as I say, if you’re going to win back those wandering voters you have to give them darn good reasons for coming back. Let’s face it, why would they come back to parties whose collective share of the opinion poll ratings is about the same as Sinn Féin’s share? Why would they come back to parties who give the impression of entitlement when it comes to the electorate?

I can’t quite explain how Sinn Féin has managed to do so well on both sides of the border (although it’s always a mistake to blame voters for their choices). That said, nor do I know how it would perform if it were ever to lead a government in the south – where it would be much easier to judge its performance than it is in the executive.

Some day – because it happens to all parties – Sinn Féin will come a cropper. And that day is likely to come when it is Sinn Féin which is responsible for key socio/economic decisions and unable to point the finger of blame at others: the ‘ourselves alone’ position it would rather not be in.

Meantime, its continuing rise is neither inevitable nor unstoppable. But it’s worth bearing in mind that the ongoing rise has been made a good deal easier by the continuing failure of its political rivals to acknowledge the part their own cock-ups and missteps have contributed to that rise.