HERE is a form of words you haven’t seen before: “The Taoiseach, Mary Lou McDonald”.
If you’re a unionist or a conservative nationalist and you just got out of bed, then it might spoil your breakfast. Relax and for goodness sake don’t choke on your Ulster Fry: the Sinn Féin leader hasn’t been promoted overnight to head of the Irish government. But we all need to get to grips with the possibility that it could happen in the not-too-distant future.
Two recent opinion polls had the ‘Shinners’ as the most popular party south of the border and a third survey put them joint first with Fine Gael. They got the highest percentage of votes in the general election held on February 8 last year and, if the party had run more candidates, it would be the biggest in the Dáil by a sizeable margin.
Opponents of Sinn Féin should not panic just yet, as the next southern general election could be as late as February 2025, although there is no guarantee that the current Dáil will serve out its full five-year term.
The political landscape has changed. Fianna Fáil, who for decades were the biggest party on the southern scene, are not the force they used to be. In the 2007 general election, they got 77 out of 166 Dáil seats but last year they came back with 38 out of 160, including the Ceann Comhairle or Speaker of the Dáil who was automatically re-elected.
SF have a good nose for a vote-getting policy and their manifesto for the 2020 election included some clear examples of that, e.g., “Sinn Féin will stop the pension age increase to 67 and return it to 65.” Fine Gael defended the age-rise on the basis that people were living longer and issuing pensions at 65 was becoming unaffordable, but that didn’t win the party many votes.
As you would expect, Sinn Féin appealed to republican sentiment with promises that in government it would establish “an all-island representative Citizens’ Assembly” or other appropriate forum to discuss and plan for a united Ireland and “Secure a referendum, north and south, on Irish Unity”. The party ended up with almost 25 per cent of first-preference votes, many from working people who are attracted by SF’s policies on bread-and-butter issues like the pension age but who also cherish, on another level, the traditional dream of a united Ireland.
We now have an unprecedented Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition with the Greens as a third party. Given their republican histories, a future government alliance between Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin might seem logical on paper but at the present time a fair proportion of FF supporters would still feel uncomfortable about such an arrangement.
That feeling could change in the future. After all, Mary Lou McDonald was a member of their party before moving over to Sinn Féin and almost all of Sinn Féin’s Dáil representatives are too young to be associated with the era of the Troubles.
Sinn Féin participation in a Dublin-based government would of course intensify the debate over Irish unity, since that cause is the party’s principal raison d’etre. The issue came up again with last weekend’s publication in the Sunday Times of a LucidTalk survey which found that a majority of 47 to 42 per cent in Northern Ireland favour retaining the union, with 11 per cent undecided, whilst a majority of 51 to 44 per cent want a border poll by 2025 at the latest.
Meanwhile there was no comfort for unionists in the London Evening Standard column by former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne where he wrote that, because of the special arrangements made as a result of Brexit, “Northern Ireland is already heading for the exit door. By remaining in the EU single market, it is for all economic intents and purposes now slowly becoming part of a united Ireland.” A somewhat different viewpoint was expressed by Robert Shrimsley in a column for the Financial Times where he suggested that “the commercial advantages of being in both the UK and EU single markets” could be used as a “best of both worlds” argument for retaining the union.
We are indeed living in a period of flux and change with some very interesting times ahead.
Email: Ddebre1@aol.com; Twitter:@DdeBreadun
