Reality Bites for Sinn Fein

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Ireland Calling with John Spain

Reality Bites for Sinn Fein

June 28, 2007

By John Spain

THINGS were looking pretty good for Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern last week. One daughter has just had twins, the other daughter’s book is on top of the bestseller list and Dublin beat Meath in the replay at Croke Park. On top of that, of course, there is the small matter of him getting down to business last week starting his historic third term as taoiseach.

The week before last, after being elected taoiseach again, he had appointed his new Cabinet. Last week he completed the job of government formation by appointing his junior ministers, up from 17 to 20. Jobs for the boys, you might say.

And all the ministers and junior ministers seem to be settling in nicely. Even the two Green ministers have looked capable and comfortable in their first week in office.

Already that holiday feeling is spreading through the Dail (Parliament), and there is an air of summer torpor about the place. Political business is slowing down like it always does at this time of year as the beaches and the golf courses beckon.

Which gives us time in this column, as promised a couple of weeks back, to look in more depth at one of the big stories of the election, the disastrous performance of Sinn Fein.

It would be tempting to say that they have been “decommissioned” by the electorate. But that would be too kind because it implies that the electorate seriously engaged with them in the first place. In fact Sinn Fein’s problem was even worse they were ignored.

They had very high hopes going into this election, which they saw as an important watershed for them. This was to be the big pay-off for peace in the north, a major breakthrough for them in the south.

They exuded a confident expectation that after the election they would hold the balance of power in the south and that Ahern would be forced to do a backflip and bring them into his cabinet. Then they would be in government north and south of the border, the perfect position from which to push their united Ireland agenda and show themselves to be the only true all-Ireland party.

In the outgoing Dail they had five seats. They were predicting that they would double that number after the election at least!

Martin McGuinness said a few weeks back, “We have begun the countdown to a united Ireland.” He predicted that the big story of the election would be “the growth of the Sinn Fein vote and the increased number of seats we will win in Leinster House.”

But it was not to be. Instead of winning seats they actually lost a seat, which means they now have only four out of the 166 seats in the Dail.

The election was a disaster for them. After all the predictions and posturing, it was a bitter lesson in the real politik of the south. For Sinn Fein, it was a severe case of reality biting.

The big question for them was what went wrong? Followed closely by, where can Sinn Fein go from here?

Schadenfreude (taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others) is not a very admirable occupation so I will try not to indulge myself too much as I answer these questions. But there’s no getting away from the fact that this was a disastrous election for Sinn Fein.

The extent of their failure is probably best illustrated not by their failure to get new people elected, but by the fact that some of their established names struggled to get back. Martin “the gunrunner” Ferris in Kerry North, for example, topped the poll (got the highest number of votes) among the various candidates in his constituency (electoral area) in the last Dail election in 2002. This time he was the last to get elected in the area.

Similarly Aengus O Snodaigh, some of whose associates were caught in 2002 in a van with bogus Garda (police) uniforms, balaclavas, axe handles, CS gas and radios, is the party’s spokesman on justice! He was extremely lucky to get back in this time in the Dublin South Central constituency.

Since Sean Crowe lost his seat on the west side of the city, if O Snodaigh had not got back Sinn Fein would have had no one in the Dail representing Dublin. And given the party’s hopes of making a breakthrough by presenting itself as the savior of the deprived areas around the city, that is pretty bad.

So where did it all go wrong? I have already explained in this column that this election marked what could be a permanent shift in what used to be called left wing politics here.

So many blue collar workers, especially in construction, have benefited so much from the boom over the last decade that they now see themselves as above the politics of protest. Instead of being on the outside they now see themselves as insiders, people who are part of the ongoing economic prosperity.

The last thing they want to see is any change that might turn the economy downwards and lower their lifestyles. In a word, the last thing they want is change. So all Sinn Fein’s campaigning about the need for “real change” was a turnoff for them.

Of course there are still areas of chronic unemployment, with drug and social problems, where the Sinn Fein message of higher welfare benefits and other handouts gets the votes. But there are not enough votes in this approach to make any kind of breakthrough in the Dail on the scale that Sinn Fein was talking about. To the rest of the country, the reformed Marxist policies of the Shinners seemed out of touch or even bizarre.

Of course they have attempted to move away from this Marxist background and now try to position themselves as left of centre social democrats. They abandoned their policy on higher corporation tax as the election got underway because they realized it would be seen as anti-enterprise and a threat to jobs.

But this late conversion on economics is unconvincing. No one here is prepared to trust them with the future of the economy, so the voters turned away.

The intervention of Gerry Adams was counter-productive, exposing the resentment that many southerners have for northerners coming down here and telling us how to run the economy and improve our society. And it got worse for Adams when he was subjected to intensive questioning by reporters here.

Adams’s droning mantra about people having “rights” showed that he was ignorant of the complex detail that underlies most of the problems here. Talk about “equality” and “rights” may have been good enough in the North in the past in the Them and Us society that existed up there. But it sounds juvenile down here and it made him look vaguely comic during the campaign, like an entertainer with a script that was not working.

The other eye-opener for Sinn Fein, of course, was that there was very little peace dividend for them, very little gratitude for them from the voters. Ahern had already hoovered up all that, with his speech at Westminster and his stroll along the banks of the Boyne with Ian Paisley. As I have pointed out before, Fianna Fail is the constitutional Republican party here and they are not going to concede that ground to Sinn Fein.

Even worse was the Sinn Fein pitch to voters that they could be in government north and south and so hasten the arrival of a united Ireland. I’ve got news for them, if they have not learned it from the vote.

In spite of what people here say, they do not really want a united Ireland because they realize that it will cost them a fortune in state handouts to people up there who have never worked, it will be a drag on our economy since the northern economy is so underdeveloped, and on top of that there would be all those disgruntled Unionists to deal with, not to speak of northern Nationalists who are so far behind thinking down here.

Like the other opposition parties, Sinn Fein also tried to make a big play out of the health service failings here, without realizing that this was another bogus issue. The fact is that more than half the country here has private health insurance and for them health is not an issue at all.

For the rest, they do resent getting caught in the pinch points in Accident and Emergency units at hospitals where at times serious overcrowding does occur with consequent delays. But once into the system they also say they are happy with the care they get and the dedication of staff. So like Fine Gael, Sinn Fein were on a loser with that one as well.

Sean Crowe lost his Sinn Fein seat on the west side of the city but the supposedly hated Progressive Democrats Minister for Health Mary Harney held on to hers and has now held on to her job in the new government as well.

Throughout the election here, Sinn Fein looked and sounded like kids in an alien adult world. They have a lot of growing up and learning to do before many people here will vote for them.

They need to start in the north, learning the minutiae of how a modern free enterprise democracy runs. If after five or 10 years of being successful administrators and politicians in the northern government, they come back here again in a major attempt to win votes, they might be more welcome. Especially if they can show that they have put the past behind them and reached a genuine partnership with unionism.

If they can do that, I might even vote for them myself 10 years from now. But in the meantime lads, it’s heads down, work hard, and less pontificating.

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